The STOP Method
STOP
Today, email phishing scams have become very dangerous and popular. These attempts to get sensitive information can create a huge problem for businesses. This is increasingly getting worse with attackers finding creative ways to try to lure you in, hence the name “phishing”. However, when you are alert and take dynamic measures, you can protect yourself from being a victim of these scams. We will discuss the STOP method and how you can protect yourself from phishing attacks.
The STOP method stands for:
Suspicious?
Telling you to click?
Offering something amazing?
Pushing you to act quickly?
We will go through each of these questions, to make this muscle memory for you for years to come.
Suspicious?
Suspicious emails include misspellings, poor grammar, unexpected content, or a gut feeling. As kids, we were taught not to talk to strangers, but in this case, strangers can look very familiar. Email vigilance extends beyond just unknown senders.
Telling you to click?
Links can redirect you to anything, and in this case, one click can be bad news. These links do not always go where they say they go. Scammers use link shorteners like “Bit.ly” to make links shorter, which is suspicious. Also, if you see a word in the link that you find familiar, it does not mean the link will go to that page.
Offering something too good to be true?
If you recently won a free iPad…. you did not. These types of emails can offer you free prizes and usually have the word “congratulations” on them. If it is too good to be true, ignore it.
Pushing you to act quickly?
Emails that ask you to do something quickly that you usually need to complete with more caution should be a huge red flag right off the bat. For example, your boss asks you to complete an invoice immediately or an email from your bank to confirm a receipt fund by one hour.
At EV-Consultech, we help users fight against these potential malicious attacks. We train them every month with different simulated phishing attacks called “phishing campaigns”. Users also have the option to report a suspicious email by using our provided Ironscales tool. This is the tool we use to send in our campaigns, and it also provides users with a button in outlook to report a specific email as a phishing email. Contact us today and learn more about the importance of cybersecurity knowledge.
