What is Phishing?

Administration

What is Phishing?

By: Darren Cantrill

Phishing (phish·ing | \ ˈfi-shiŋ) noun: is one of the many new computerrelated terms that have found their way into the general lexicon over the past decade or so.

Its "ph" spelling is influenced by an earlier word for an illicit act: "phreaking."

Phreaking involves fraudulently using an electronic device to avoid paying for telephone calls and its name is suspected of being a shortening of "phone freak."

A common phishing scam involves sending e-mails that appear to come from banks requesting recipients to verify their accounts by typing personal details, such as credit card info into a website that has been disguised to look like the real thing.

Such scams can be thought of as "fishing" for naive recipients.

Recently, many DOT employees received a “Phishing” email like this:

1. Right away, I noticed the email address for Microsoft Security Support was do-not-reply@ mso365security.biz which doesn’t match anything I’ve ever received from Microsoft (ex: anything@microsoft.com).

And, the fact that I received this email WHILE in O365 indicated that I probably wasn’t locked out (lower right corner of my email it shows my outlook status):

2. If you suspect that an email is a Phishing attempt, report it by selecting “Report Phish” at the top of outlook and then delete the email:

Note: Now delete the email. 3. If you use the web version of Outlook, you can still report a phishing email by selecting the “3 dots” (ellipses) on the far-right hand side, select “Report Phish”: Note: Now delete the email.

If you think a scammer has your information, like your Social Security, credit card, or bank account number, go to IdentityTheft.gov.

There, you’ll see the specific steps to take based on the information that you lost.

If you think you clicked on a link or opened an attachment that downloaded harmful software, update your computer’s security software. Then run a scan.