How To Spot Bogus Emails

Bogus emails or phishing emails are aimed to trick you into giving your banking or sensitive information to the hackers. How you can spot bogus email?

First of all, the email will not address you personally. Instead of 'Dear [yourname],' it will be something like 'Dear Friend'. As you can see, the emails are not personalized to you. So, there is a great chance that this type of email is bogus.

Spam emails always use the same format. It didn't address you personally, instead it will be just 'Hi' or 'Greetings'. Such as the 419 scam.

Second, try searching the Internet for the same email subject or body. You will probably find out more and will know if the email is a bogus email.

Third, view the message header. You can do this on your email clients or using PopTray. PopTray can reveal a message header and raw body. So, bogus and phishing emails cannot hide the links inside the emails.

To spot bogus emails, these three tips can help you.

How I Managed To Filter Phishing Website

Several days ago, I received a phishing email. The email asked me to update my banking information. At that time, I already installed two tools that will prevent me from visiting phishing website.

So, I decided to try the tools by trying to visit the phishing website. After I clicked the link, it opened my browser and my browser tried to visit the website. However, the first tool blocked the website saying it's a phishing website. Then, I clicked 'visit the site' despite the warning because I want to see if the other tool is working and sure enough, the second tool blocked me from visiting the phishing website.

Today I want to share with you what are the tools so you can use it and browse the Internet safely from phishing websites. The first one is Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 7 has built-in phishing filter and this is the first one that blocked me from visiting the phishing website.

The second tool is McAffe Site Advisor. It blocked me after I skip the Internet Explorer phishing filter warning. So, by having these two tools, you can know if you're visiting phishing websites. Therefore, I highly recommend you to use these tools. But, if you're using Firefox, then download McAffe Site Advisor. It's very good.

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