Phishing emails, a thing of the past or even more of a threat than before?

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails flooding your inbox this week, it’s prime time for hackers to slip their scam emails in along with the genuine ones. With an influx of emails to read, your guard may not be as high as usual, meaning you become vulnerable to falling victim to a scam email. At Backup Systems, our Director Mark Ridley received an email pertaining to be about monthly wages, even with the market leader of email scanning and protection tools in use, this email still managed to slip through the net. Extra care should always be taken when opening emails with attachments, especially ones that you weren’t expecting to receive, this email could’ve been passed off as legit, if it hadn’t been for a number of tell-tale signs that differentiate it from a real genuine one.

The email itself has a lot of strange formatting, that you otherwise would not find present in an official email. The subject for the email has underscores between every word rather than spaces, this might not be out of place to most users, and they might not even think twice about it, but this type of formatting seems to be present in a lot of phishing emails. The sender’s name is also formatted strangely with underscores, non-capitalization, and a vertical bar. Thanks to Outlook, we can see that the actual email address is nothing like the display name it’s pertaining to be, revealing that the display name is a fake to trick the user, with the actual email address being completely different. 

To further gain the attention of the reader, the email has been marked as high priority to make it stand out. This could also be done to prevent it from landing in the user’s junk or spam folder, however this doesn’t always work, and these types of email will still end up in there. This email in particular has even incorporated the Backup Systems logo, which we can only assume has been lifted off of our website, but due to the company name being in white, the letters aren’t visible.

The main threat with this email however is the attached PDF file, which would contain whatever malicious threat, be it malware or ransomware. Simply downloading it or opening it is all it takes for the hacker to be in control. Suddenly you loose access to everything and this can be catastrophic for your business. The absolute, best way to recover after falling victim to a phishing email is to restore from a backup, but if you don’t have one, you’re left to start from scratch.

Backup Systems offer a wide array of backup solutions that can be found under our managed services at www.backupsystems.co.uk. These backups exist separately from your system meaning that, in the event of a phishing email or any other form of attack for that matter, the backups remain unaffected, and you will be able to restore from the point before they became compromised.

Waiting till after an attack has happened will be too late, nothing will be able to restore what is lost.

So, don’t carry on without a backup thinking it won’t happen to you, get in touch today for a free demo of our services, where you can see for yourself the quality of backups we provide. Not convinced? See for yourself what people think about us here. https://www.reviews.co.uk/company-reviews/store/back-up-systems-ltd