Q. Is there any way to tell if an email is malicious?
A. Hackers are getting more sophisticated and it can be a challenge to identify malicious emails. Here are some tips that may help you. You need to be careful about suspicious emails. Remember don't open attached files if you are suspicious and don't click on embedded links. The simple act of clicking on a link may be enough to have your computer infected with malware or ransomware.
- Look out for bad grammar or spelling, often English is not the first language of the hackers, so there may be mistakes
- If the email seems too good to be true, then it probably is. For example, you have won a lottery or inherited a fortune
- Be careful about emails purporting to come from Banks or PayPal or iTunes, or indeed any service that has your credit card or account details. They will try to entice you on to their realistic looking but fake site to capture your
username and password and spend your money
- If a suspicious email has links, then hold your mouse cursor over the link to see where the link is really going. When you do this you can see that a link that is displayed as http://www.apple.com is actually something completely
different, like http://www.somehackedsite.net/honeytrap. Please be careful to only hover over the link, don't click it or you may be in all sorts of trouble
- A malicious email may come from the email address of someone you know. This could be because their email
account was hacked or the hacker could be spoofing their email address
- An email that attaches a .zip compressed file should be treated with caution, because the act of unpacking the compressed file may be enough to get you in trouble
- If you are not sure, then be safe and delete the email.
Overall you should restrict email in the practice to work emails only and you should consider switching from normal
email to secure email. The Healthmail service is secure, private and confidential and all Healthmail messages are scanned for viruses and malware.