As part of our ongoing Cybersecurity initiatives you may see the header "You don't often get email from email@domain.com . Learn why this is important."
This is an additional piece of information provided when deciding if an email is legitimate or not. Though it may take some time to detect someone you regularly converse with.
This initiative is designed to help mitigate attacks where a malicious actor hijacks a legitimate email chain in an attempt to seem like a person you have been having a conversation or using a new but similar email to pretend to be someone you know. These features are designed to provide you with as much information as possible to help you determine the legitimacy of a given message.
If you receive a phishing email please use the Report a Phish button available in Outlook. https://cambriancollege.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/129/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=3237
Here are some other ways to recognize a phishing email:
- Urgent call to action or threats - Be suspicious of emails that claim you must click, call, or open an attachment immediately. Often, they'll claim you have to act now to claim a reward or avoid a penalty. Creating a false sense of urgency is a common trick of phishing attacks and scams. They do that so that you won't think about it too much or consult with a trusted advisor who may warn you.
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First time or infrequent senders - While it's not unusual to receive an email from someone for the first time, especially if they are outside your organization, this can be a sign of phishing. When you get an email from somebody you don't recognize, or that Outlook identifies as a new sender, take a moment to examine it extra carefully.
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Spelling and bad grammar - Professional companies and organizations usually have an editorial staff to make sure customers get high-quality, professional content. If an email message has obvious spelling or grammatical errors, it might be a scam. These errors are sometimes the result of awkward translation from a foreign language, and sometimes they're deliberate in an attempt to evade filters that try to block these attacks.
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Suspicious links or unexpected attachments - If you suspect that an email message is a scam, don't open any links or attachments that you see. Instead, hover your mouse over, but don't click, the link to see if the address matches the link that was typed in the message.
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Mismatched email domains - If the email claims to be from a reputable company, like Microsoft or your bank, but the email is being sent from another email domain like Gmail.com, or microsoftsupport.ru it's probably a scam. Also be watchful for very subtle misspellings of the legitimate domain name. Like micros0ft.com where the second "o" has been replaced by a 0, or rnicrosoft.com, where the "m" has been replaced by an "r" and a "n". T