Our company’s customers have become a target of email phishing scams to gain unauthorized access to email accounts.  This article will serve to help better educate our customers to what phishing is, how to spot it, and how to avoid it.

WHAT IS PHISHING

Phishing is the act of sending you an email or website in which looks authentic but serves no purpose other than to steal your credentials.   It works by setting a fake site that may look legitimate with a form that does nothing but send the details you enter to the thief.  Once you enter this information you have given them access to your email account or hosting account.

SPOTTING PHISHING

See the image we posted.  You can spot phishing because it is asking you to click a link without addressing you by NAME.  When we send a customer service email, you are addressed by name and when you click the link you will ALWAYS be directed to a website under goldsborowebdevelopment.com or goldsboronetworks.com.   Phishing emails will always send you to another website that does not belong to us.  Sometimes they can even get tricky by having a website domain:  goldsborowebdevelopment.example.com.  This does not belong to us as goldsborowebdevelopment is a sub-domain of example.com.   Ensure no other characters exist between our name and the .com.

Another way you can sometimes spot Phishing is looking at the From field if you are using our email services as our email servers will block any from addresses that do not originate form authenticated users.

AVOIDING PHISHING

Once you know how to spot the phishing scams, it’s easy to avoid them by simply deleting the email.  As long as you don’t click, you have nothing to worry about.  If you do click and you enter your details, CALL US IMMEDIATELY to reset your passwords.