If you are like most of us, we are so “over” the concerns of Cybersecurity. It seems like there are to many ways in which we get “taken to the cleaners” by a bad person or organization.  Let’s just call these individuals and organizations what they are… CRIMINALS.

One of the things that we are seeing regularly here at Simple Website Creations is the email delivery of scams, or malware. These emails continue to get better and better as time goes on. In many cases they are so convincing because they often appear to be getting delivered by a company you know, or someone you know. 

These emails may try to get you to click on a link/url or open a file that comes in as an attachment. If you click the link, it may bring you to a page that downloads malicious software or is an attempt to “phish” information from you so that they can somehow garner credit card info, personal information, and more. If you download the file, it could be an installation file, or a corrupt file that somehow installs spyware, malicious software, or ransomware on to your computer.

Just this morning, one of our staff received a very realistic email in which presented itself as coming from Quickbooks. Simple Website Creations uses Quickbooks as it’s accounting and billing software, so this seemed very plausible. This email stated that it contained an invoice for $380.56, and it had a .pdf attachment with part of the title of the file being “Invoice 1001”. You want to assume that because it says that the email is coming from Quickbooks that it would be okay to open the attachment or click on a link… right? The answer to that is definitely “Wrong”. 

Upon closer inspection…

• We noticed that the actual email address in which the email was coming from was not even a Quickbooks, or Intuit domain extension. 
• It showed in the “From” line that it was coming from an individual’s name. Which though it could happen, seems a little weird since it is supposed to be coming from a big company.
• Even the invoice number of 1001 is weird. Quickbooks/Intuit is huge. What are the chances that any invoice sent out is an invoice #1001? Isn’t that a number that when you are a young person opening up your first checking account they say you should start with?
• Nothing on the invoice was personalized. The email content just said “Dear Sir/Mam”. With Quickbooks, you create that account in which a name it associated with the account.
• And finally, in looking at previous payments, we auto-renew in an earlier month in the year, so the timing was way off in the billing. 

This email was marked as “phishing” with our security software and completely deleted without clicking or downloading anything. Simple Website Creations is not an IT Company or a Cybersecurity firm. We encourage you to protect your work and/or personal email with common sense practices. At a minimum, please use a good security software for your computer system, and if possible, hire a Cybersecurity professional to help administer and protect you from terrible things such as phishing scams, malware intrusion, or ransomware.

Simple Website Creations is a digital marketing agency that can help you with numerous digital marketing projects such as websites, social media marketing, Droid & iOs application development, and more.  Please give us a call at 218-297-1500 (Ext. 1) or Contact Us today to get started!