By Matthew Sotlar / The Jambar
With the holiday season fast approaching, many buyers will order gifts from online retailers. While having purchases delivered to the front door has its perks, it also comes with the risk of being hacked.
Associate Director of IT Services Sean Melnik said one of the more common scams is impersonating official agencies via email or text.
“Typically what [hackers] do is they’ll impersonate reputable shipping and logistics companies,” Melnik said. “It looks like you got an email or text from [United States Postal Service], Fedex or [Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn].”
Melnik said there are ways to identify these scam messages, such as suspicious links within emails and poor grammar.
“What you end up seeing is the language inside of [the email] is very broken,” Melnik said. “Something else you’ll notice is they will use the company logo, but if you hover your mouse over the logo where they’re trying to get you to click, it’s some off-the-wall kind of URL.”
If these links are interacted with, the risk of downloading or being infected with malware increases.
“They try to impersonate companies in that sense, but really it’s not going to their website. It’s going to some kind of website containing malware or the ability to potentially hack the person that clicks it by having a fake format there and gathering information,” Melnik said.
Melnik said the best course of action when dealing with a phishing email is to report and delete it.
“In Outlook, you have the ability to use the PhishAlarm. The one thing you may want to do is go to the PhishAlarm button in Outlook and report it accordingly,” Melnik said.
While these phishing scams are common, Melnik said they increase in volume during the holidays.
“Anyone can get it,” Melnik said. “These are sort of seasonal. You can get these any time of the year, but around the holidays, it’ll ramp up. In a couple of months when we start talking about tax season, you’ll start to see emails that look like they came from the [Internal Revenue Service], for example.”
Melnik said buyers should be mindful of when and what they purchase online to avoid becoming victims of these scams.
“The other thing that students and faculty and staff should be mindful of is, ‘Did they recently order something? Is this something they would expect?’ Things of that nature. They try to craft these messages so they look legitimate, but there are subtle details inside of the messages that you can easily identify,” Menik said.
Melnik said anyone unsure of an official-looking email can contact IT Services.
“When in doubt, don’t click,” Melnik said. “If you’re ever unsure or if you ever feel that you’ve been compromised in any way, shape or form, or your account has been compromised, you can always contact the IT Service Desk.”
The IT Service Desk is located in Kilcawley Center and can be contacted at 330-941-1595.
