Examples of Email Phishing (with images)

96% of phishing attacks arrive by email, 3% are through malicious websites, and 1% via phone. When it’s done over the phone, it is called vishing (voice phishing), and smishing (SMS phishing) when it’s done by text message. Therefore, to protect your business from email phishing, it is needed to detect a phishing email. Based on IT Governance UK Blog, there are several ways to recognise email phishing, for example:

1. The message is sent from a public email domain

Source: Pickr

One of the most obvious ways to spot scam email is if the sender uses a public email domain, such as ‘@gmail.com’, ‘@yahoo.com’, ‘@outlook.com’, etc, because most companies and organisations these days will have their own email domain and company accounts. In this example, the sender appears to be from PayPal under the “Account Support” name but if you check the recipient email address, it uses a free public domain ‘@gmail.com’.

Some sophisticated approach is by including the organisation’s name as part of the domain, for example ‘[email protected]’. At first glance, it seems like a legit email address because it has the word ‘PayPal’, but it is pretty much impossible for a huge company such as PayPal to use free email from Google.

2. The domain name is misspelt

Source: GoPTG

In contrast with previous way to spot email phishing, this time the email address is not from a free account such as ‘@gmail.com’, but has a “valid” domain name. Nowadays, it is easy to buy a domain name from a registrar. In this example, the scammer has registered the domain ‘microsfrtonline.com’ which can be seen as ‘microsoft online’ at glance. Therefore, we need  to carefully check the spelling of the email address.

3. The email is poorly written

Source: KNOWBE4

Why are so many phishing emails poorly written? 

It is because most scammers are not very good at writing and many of them are from non-English-speaking countries. So, when they create phishing messages, scammers will often use a spellchecker or translation machine, which will give them all the right words but not necessarily in the proper context.

From the example above, there are strings of missed words, such as in “a malicious user might be trying to access” and “Please contact Security Communication Centre”. These are consistent with the kinds of mistakes people make when learning English. Any supposedly official message that’s written this way is almost certainly a scam.

With this in mind, it becomes a lot easier to spot the difference between a typo made by a legitimate sender and a scam.

4. It includes infected attachments or suspicious links

Source: MailGuard

Like the example above, the scammer claims to be sending an invoice with an infected attachment and links. When the recipient opens the attachment, they will see that the invoice is not for them. The attachment unleashes malware on the victim’s computer that can perform any malicious activities and might harm the business.

Therefore, never open an attachment unless you are fully confident that the message is from a legitimate party. Although, you should look out and check carefully for anything suspicious in the attachment.

5. The message creates a sense of urgency

Source: MailGuard

The cyber criminals know that we are going to pay more attention if our boss or senior colleagues send us an email with a vital request. So, in email phishing the sense of urgency is manufactured because the scammers understand it will be effective in a workplace.  

That’s why so many scams request that you act now or else it will be too late. This has been evident in every example we have used so far.