Watch out for con artists using crisis as a cover
THE increased use of technology to help people stay in touch with friends and family as well as to work from home during the Covid-19 pandemic has sparked off an increase in activity by scammers, hackers and other digital deviants.
There is a reported surge in malware, crafted attacks, targeted campaigns and ransom ware in the past few weeks. This week alone emails landed in mail boxes in West Kerry with a subject “Important Payment Notification for COVID”. The email gives details of a supposed “Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme operated by Government”, but it is completely false and designed to extract information from unsuspecting email users.
Last week there was another fake email, purporting to be from Aer Lingus and offering free travel vouchers. The flow of false emails offering false advice and unlikely free offers is continuous, and very few email users escape them.
However, there are some simple steps that can be taken to ensure that an email is genuine. Common sense is generally the first measure: if an offer looks too good to be true, treat it as a threat. Not all scam emails make offers; some mimic government announcements but if the email appears to contain an official announcement the sender’s email address will hold the key to deciding if it is real.
An email address is divided into three parts, let’s call them a, b and c. An example would be an address such as aaa@bbb.ccc. The two most important parts, when determining if an email is genuine, are bbb and ccc. For example any email from the department of agriculture will be in the following format: firstname.surname@agriculture.gov.ie the ‘ b’ part should be the name of the company, in this case ‘agriculture’ and if the email is from government the ccc part should be gov.ie. In the case of the Revenue Commissioners the address would be aaa@revenue.ie or the HSE would be aaa@hse.ie.
Under no circumstances should you reply to an email that you have identified as a scam. Delete these emails if you can, otherwise just leave them sitting in your mailbox where they are unlikely to do any harm. In general, reading the emails does not cause a problem, it is clicking on the links or opening attachments that may lead to problems.
Standard security measures should be in place on any device. If in doubt consult with someone who is knowledgeable about computers, but in all cases ignore emails that look suspicious.