Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Week 1

Oct. 2, 2023

Welcome to week one of Cybersecurity Awareness Month. This week, we will be focusing on recognizing and reporting phishing.

Phishing is a social engineering technique where hackers use fake emails to lure you into handing over your personal information or installing malware on your device. Phishing is the most common form of cybercrime, and an estimated 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent out daily. But it isn’t enough to simply know that phishing emails are out there; you also need to be able to recognize and report them.

Here are some quick tips on how to clearly spot a fake phishing email:

• Contains an offer that is too good to be true
• Language that’s urgent, alarming or threatening
• Poorly crafted writing with misspellings and bad grammar
• Greetings that are ambiguous or very generic
• Requests you to send personal information
• Urgency to click on an unfamiliar hyperlink or attachment
• Strange or abrupt business requests
• Sending email address does not match the company it is coming from

What to do if you spot a phishing email:

Don’t worry. You have already done the hard part, which is recognizing that an email is fake and part of a hacker’s phishing campaign. URI’s ITS Security Services continuously monitors for phishing emails and acts when the message source can be reliably determined.

If you receive a suspicious email, please forward it to abuse@uri.edu where it will be automatically analyzed and the results used to prevent additional deliveries.

Now, take this week’s quiz and see what you’ve learned!

Thank you for keeping the University of Rhode Island safe!

This message is posted on behalf of URI’s Information Technology Services (ITS).