May bank holidays are looming and we still seem to be waiting for the promised heatwave but at least the days are lighter for longer! This month we’re taking a look at how you can protect against email spoofing and a good news story on the fightback against the hackers.
Email authentication
Email spoofing has become an ever-increasing problem where scammers disguise their email addresses to look like legitimate individuals or organisations. By spoofing a business’s email address and asking for information to be entered via a clickable link, they can all too easily get their hands on your personal information as well as impact both the reputation and financial situation of the business concerned. So how can you protect yourself? Email authentication is a way of verifying that your email is legitimate and can also report back unauthorised uses of a company domain. There are three key protocols used that record IP addresses authorised to send email for a domain, digitally “sign” emails to verify legitimacy and message authentication and reporting that alerts domain owners to spoofing
LabHost – down and out
We know we spend a lot of time warning our readers about cyber security issues that are sadly more and more prevalent, so we thought we would bring you a good news story this month. The Metropolitan Police has recently shut down LabHost, a phishing-as-a-service website. The Met worked with police forces from 19 countries to disrupt what was the world’s largest phishing-as-a-service platform, used by more than 2,000 criminals worldwide to launch and manage phishing attacks. This Computer Weekly article provides more details, with arrests all over the globe. Whilst it’s good to see some success against the hackers, it underscores the need to remain ever vigilant.