Welcome to Phishing E-mail Study brought to you by IBM. In this video, we'll look at an example of a phishing e-mail, we analyze what techniques the bad actors used to trick the end user, and then we'll review what to look out for and see if we can identify in our example. Let's get started. So here's our sample phishing e-mail. I had mentioned in the video prior that I had once fallen victim to a PayPal phishing scam, so I thought it only fit to go through this example so that everyone can learn from my mistakes. So first off, we look at from top to bottom, it says from PayPal, and that might be all we see in our inbox, but when you open up the message, you'll see the message is from paypal@notice-access-273.com and then the date, subject: Your Account Has Been Limited, with a case ID number. Now, we get into the body of the e-mail. It has their logo PayPal, and then Dear customer, we need your help resolving an issue with your account. To give us time to work together on this, we've temporarily limited what you can do with your account until the issue is resolved. We understand it may be frustrating not to have full access to PayPal account. We want to work with you to get your account back to normal as quickly as possible. What the problems? We noticed some unusual activity on your PayPal account. As a security precautions to protect your account until we have more details from you, we've placed a limitation on your account. How you can help? It's usually pretty easy to take care of things like this. Most of the time, we just need a little more information about your account to help us with this in to find out what you can and can't do with your account until the issue is resolved. Log in to your account and go to the Resolution Center. There's a big blue login button that spans the length of the e-mail, and then in the footer, there's Help, Contact, Security links, and then some link this e-mail was sent to you, please do not reply to this e-mail. Unfortunately, we're not able to respond to inquiry sent to this address. For immediate answers to your questions, simply visit our Help Center by clicking the help at the bottom of any PayPal page, and then copyright, all rights reserved. So looking at this e-mail, one thing that they've done very well is they've mimic the look of a PayPal e-mail. So we see, we have official logos a lot of times, the footer at the bottom with the legal texts and things like that help give it a little more credibility. Things like putting a case number in the subject might lend some credibility as well. The logo is copy and pasted, and things like that. Some things that jumped out to me right away. The e-mail address isn't @paypal.com, it's from a random custom domain that we haven't heard of, and the English wasn't perfect, which I think when you're just reading it in your head, you skim over and your brain makes up for that. But when you read it out loud, it's really apparent. So those are just some things I picked on. Let's actually review some of the more common things to look for and see if we can find them in this e-mail. The first thing we want to look up for is a suspicious sender's address. So my first red flag went up. It says from PayPal but when you open it up, you'll see that that is not an official e-mail address. Definitely suspicious. The second red flag we're looking for are generic greetings and signature. Here, it says, "Dear customer". If they're sending it to me, it should be addressed with my name, and this tells me that this is likely a mass e-mail that went out on a distribution list. The next one is spoofed, hyperlinks, and websites. While this is just a screenshot of the e-mails, we can't physically click on anything. Chances are when you hover over any button or hyperlink, you can see the URL behind it and you can make sure that it is an official source that you recognize. When in doubt, you need to not follow the link from the e-mail, just open up your Internet browser separately, go to that website, login, and see if there's any suspicious activity there. The fourth red flag, spelling and layout. So while I think the layout here looks good, there were some definite spelling and grammatical errors. Now, especially from larger companies, all these e-mails go through design and copy editing, and there will not be any spelling errors. So if you see any of those, it should be immediate red flag for you. The last red flag is suspicious attachments. Attachments in general, if you're getting attachment from somebody you don't know, it's likely suspicious, and that's not something that you want to click on and open up, you just want to delete the e-mail altogether. So those are the red flags that we should be looking out for in the e-mail. I'm glad we saw quite a few of them here on our sample. Now that we've covered what phishing is and have gone over some examples, it's time to talk about the impact phishing has on both corporations and the individual. We'll see in the next video.