HARK! DON'T FALL FOR HACKERS!
Staying Cyber-Safe During the Holidays
Many phishing attempts can be thwarted simply by educating your employees. Even if you catch red flags in an email, such as typos or poor grammar, an urgent demeanor, or even a spoofed domain, how can you truly decipher the safety of an email?
An immediate step you can take is to watch out for one of the most critical tell-tale signs of a phishing email – a mismatched or fake URL.
Why is hovering important? What can it do for you?
Hovering not only allows you a moment to think before proceeding, it allows you the opportunity to see where a link is going to redirect you. This is especially important because not all links lead to where they appear, or insinuate they'll go.
When you hover, check for the following to ensure you're staying safe and secure:
Email spam filters are useful tools that prevent many scam emails from arriving in your inbox. Many users rely on spam filters to block phishing emails and, as a result, trust that emails sent to their inbox are legitimate. Cybercriminals take advantage of this trust by using legitimate websites like PayPal to send phishing emails and avoid spam filter detection.
Microsoft-owned social network LinkedIn is reportedly the latest victim of a massive data breach where data of 500 million user profiles has been allegedly leaked by cybercriminals. The leaked data includes email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, full names, account IDs, etc. The potential for social engineering attacks is huge.
According to CyberNews, the potential of the leak is huge. An individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was scraped from 500 million profiles. The leaked data includes users’ email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, full names, account IDs, links to social media accounts, and gender details.
Confirming the news to Business Insider, a LinkedIn spokesperson said that the leaked data has been scraped from LinkedIn. “We’re still investigating this issue, the posted dataset appears to include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies.” “Scraping our members' data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service and we are constantly working to protect our members and their data,” the spokesperson added.
The company also informed that the data of private members is safe. This means the scraped data only includes information from LinkedIn public members.
Earlier this week, personal data of 533 millions of Facebook users were allegedly leaked including 6 million people in India. The leaked Facebook data has been posted for free on hacking forums and includes date of joining, place of work, names, gender, occupation and relationship status of users. Full story at: https://www.thequint.com/tech-and-auto/data-of-500-million-linkedin-users-for-sale-on-a-site-report
