SHASS Tech Alert: Amazon Card Declined and other Phishing Scare tactics and scams

Happy New Year! Here’s hoping for a better, safer, and healthier 2021.

Sadly, bad actors and grifters continue to flood our email inboxes and phones with fake scare tactic alerts from Amazon, Paypal, Ebay, UPS, Fed EX, USPS, phone carriers, credit card companies, banks, police, three letter government agencies, etc in order to get us to become afraid and do what these bad guys want. A new one for 2020 and early 2021 have been fake Covid Vaccine phishing attacks that try to get users to pay money for non-existent priority lines, early access, or request personal information in order for you to get the Covid vaccine. Don’t fall for it, they’re all scams.

Remember, no legitimate email will ever ask you for anything or click on any links or download any files or ask you to verify personal information, account names, or passwords. They’re phishing emails trying to invoke fear so you suspend the logical part of your brain to con you into doing something you would never normally do.  These bad actors will try to get you to surrender your personal or private information or do something to infect your machine with a virus by clicking on links or downloading a file that will install a virus or malware.

If you receive a phishing email, please forward these phishing emails “as attachments” to phishing at mit dot edu so IS&T gets all the email header information from the whole email. 

Normally if you forward an email, it only forwards the body text of the email and not the headers. Most email programs hide the headers since they’re meaningless to most users. These email headers are a record of the path the email took across the Internet to get to your mailbox. IS&T needs these headers to trace the path and origin of the phishing email to locate the phishing source which can enable them to block or mark these attacks as spam going forward.

Here’s how to Forward an email as Attachment in Outlook

https://www.lifewire.com/forward-email-as-attachment-outlook-1173689

Forward as Attachment in Apple Mail: Scroll down to “Forward an email as an attachment”

https://support.apple.com/guide/mail/reply-to-forward-or-redirect-emails-mlhlp1010/mac#:~:text=Forward%20an%20email%20as%20an,Choose%20Message%20%3E%20Forward%20as%20Attachment.

Finally, only forward us a phishing email you’re not sure if it’s actually phishing and you would like us to verify that it’s definitely phishing. If your gut tells you an email is phishing, 99.9% of the time you will be right. If you have any doubt, forward it to us and we’d be happy to verify.

Please let us know if anyone has any questions (there are no dumb questions) and please everyone have a safe and healthy start of the year!

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