Greeting SEO Members,
It has been brought to our attention that an SEO Member’s email has been compromised and sending out potentially malicious emails. We ask that you please DO NOT open, click, or interact in any way with these emails. The library has been contacted.
As a friendly reminder, here are some email safety tips that we recommend:
- Change your email password regularly (90 days or less is recommended).
- Use strong passwords for your email account. 12 or more characters is now recommended with a combination of capital, lowercase, special character and number
- Never open attachments unless you know who it is from AND you are expecting it
- Be very cautious when an email message instructs you to “enable macros” as this can be malicious in nature when opening Word or Excel documents
- If you receive an email from someone you don’t recognize, simply delete it
- Learn how to recognize phishing type emails
- Unsolicited. Don’t trust emails you weren’t expecting to receive that ask for information.
- Too good to be true. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
- Asking for personal or financial information. Don’t reply to emails requesting this information, report them.
- Deceptive web links. Hover your mouse on the hyperlink to view its true destination. If you don’t recognize it, don’t click it.
- Variations of legitimate addresses. For example, an email address ending in @libraryohiogovernent.net instead of @library.ohio.gov.
- Fake sender’s address. Click the sender’s name to view their email address.
- Requesting urgency. The attacker wants you to act quickly so you don’t notice the email is suspicious.
- Fraudulent sites often don’t start with https (the “s” stands for secure). Never sign into websites that aren’t using https.
- Misspelled words and bad grammar. A legitimate email would proofread and fix these errors before sending. Also, phishing emails are often translated from another language and are easy to recognize as fraudulent.
- Hover your mouse pointer over the URL/Link to verify that the words match. If still unsure, open a new tab and type the URL manually instead of clicking on it
- If you see that it is spam, avoid clicking “unsubscribe” as this may just validate your email address for them
- Understand that reputable businesses or government agencies will never ask for personal information via email
We at SEO hope you find some of these tips useful, and have a great day,