Think Before You Click (or Reply, or Forward)

The school closure has seen unprecedented numbers of staff being sent from their places of work and asked to work from home. For most this will be a frenzied experience, and bad guys out there might choose to use that to their advantage.

To help you stay a few steps ahead of the bad guys, TIS has some simple cybersecurity and cyber hygiene tips to help keep you safe.

Identify dangerous spam emails

Be suspicious of any emails that:

• Asking people to check or renew their passwords and login credentials
• Suspicious of emails from people you don't know 
• Ensure anti-virus is in place and fully updated (Contact TIS Help Desk if you need help with

Paying attention to the following tips to identify dangerous spam emails, before you open, click, download, or share data will go a long way toward protecting you and your data.

Watch for Unknown, Spoofed, Strange or Too good to be true Email Addresses

• Unknown email… don’t open an email from email addresses you don’t know.
• Spoofing is email addresses that appear to come from a trustworthy source to trick the recipients done in several ways including:
  • Changing the name of the sender so that it does not match the sender’s email address
  • Using characters that are like actual letters to make the sender email address to appear to be from a recognizable source, such as the character “ε” and the letter “e”
• Avoid Strange Attachments or Unfamiliar Links… refrain from downloading files or clicking through links in a strange email unless you trust the source
• Seem Too Good to Be True? It Probably Is… often in the form of a promise for large sums of money or unprompted offers for advertisement opportunities

I would add a final statement:

• If in doubt, DON'T!

Stay safe out there!