Recognizing a Phishing Email
Remember the ‘good old days’ of email (like 12-15 years ago) when the most menacing thing we had to worry about was too much advertising spam! We still have advertising spam by the virtual truckload but today we have yet another thing to add to our email worries: Phishing attempts. Phishing is a cleverly disguised email, made to look like it came from a trustworthy source, designed to steal your sensitive information, or worse, simply (and naively) convince you to give it away. Phishing emails try to get you to do one of two things: first, to simply hand over sensitive information and second, to download malware which more often than not contains ransomware. Ransomware is very, very bad. It will literally take ALL THE DATA on your PC (or server) and encrypt (lock) it so as to make it unusable to you. In order to get the “key” and de-crypt the data back to normal, you must pay a ransom. Usually this ransom payment is around $500 and must be paid in Bitcoin or other