Cyber Security Awareness Month: Spam and phishing
Email, Twitter and Facebook are great communication tools. But they can sometimes become flooded with spam.
Spam can include unsolicited messages that try to get you to buy something you don’t need, or attempts to entice you to visit a site that is infected with malware. Whether it’s a confirmation of a flight to some sunny destination or a link to a hilarious video, cyber criminals will do anything to fool you.
Worse still are phishing emails. These are messages that appear legitimate to users and look as though they come from McMaster or other institutions. They often ask you to confirm your password.
McMaster’s IT security team works to protect the University community from spam messages and phishing attempts. University Technology Services uses advanced anti-spam filters, which block millions of messages each month. But there’s no such thing as a perfect filter.
Some safe emailing practices and suggestions:
- Think before you click: always be suspicious of the messages you receive. Don’t open attachments that you weren’t expecting or seem out of character for the sender. Don’t follow links sent to you via email unless you are absolutely sure that they are safe.
- Protect you private information: don’t respond to email requests for private information such as user names and passwords and don’t send private information via email. If you are concerned about a message, call the organization that sent it to confirm that it is legitimate. Remember, UTS will never ask you to confirm your password in an email.
- Keep it clean: always keep your anti-virus software running and up to date, and always install security updates when prompted as these keep your machine safe.
For more information about mass marketing fraud, please visit the Government of Canada Competition Bureau.
For more great tips and resources, visit the Get Cyber Safe website.
Also, be sure to follow McMaster IT Security on Twitter @McMaster_ITSec where we share tips, alert followers to spam that is targeting the community and link to articles related to cyber security.
Paul Muir is a system integration specialist who focuses on security, technology and risk at McMaster’s University Technology Services.
