What is Spam?
Spam is unsolicited and unwanted harmless marketing or similar messages. They are sent to a large number of people, often through mailing lists, without malicious content. For example they may be trying to sell you a service.
What is Phishing?
Phishing is when a cyber criminal tries to extract information, login credentials, or money from you by impersonating real people or companies through text messages, phone calls, email or social media.
Recognizing a Phishing attempt.
Phishing attempts come in different varieties but often have traits in common:
1. Attempt to create urgency or use scare tactics to get you to act. Asking you to immediately input password so your emails aren't deleted, or click here so you don't lose access to your bank account.
2. Pretending to be someone you know or trust. Phishing emails will try to pretend to be your IT team, your bank, a delivery service, your manager, or other reputable sources in an attempt to gain your trust. If you are unsure check the full FROM email address (not just the name provided), or reach out through other means such as calling the IT Service Desk at 705-566-8101 x7370, messaging your manager through Skype for Business, or going directly to your banks website rather than the link provided.
3. Request for funds, often in the form of gift cards. Legitimate organizations will not ask you to purchase gift cards, and Cambrian will not ask you to purchase gift cards using your own funds.
Other things to look out for are grammatical/spelling mistakes, discrepancies between the language of links and the URLs they direct to, highly emotional or charged language, unsolicited request to download an attachment, or claiming you have won a prize without knowing what or how you entered.
If you are not sure if something is phishing or not you are encouraged to reporting it using the "Report a Phish" button or by contacting the IT service desk.
