Business owners and merchants seem to be prime targets for Email phishing attacks that are currently circulating during the busy holiday season.
This time, a malicious Email purports to be sent on behalf of the FDIC and opens, “Dear Business Owner.” The short Email correspondence claims to contain information about your financial institution and advises recipients to click on a malicious link to see the details. To further confuse the business owner, it claims to contain details of the “acquiring bank - if applicable - and how your accounts and loans are affected, and how vendors can file claims against the receivership.”
The mail is simply signed “FDIC USA.”
Please see the image in this post to see a filtered (clean) copy of the FDIC phishing Email that was detected and caught using cloud based Email security software to remove these types of threats from being delivered to your inbox. By removing these remote internet threats in a cloud environment, it stops them from being delivered to your local machines where a virus or malware program can really wreak havoc by compromising your computer network.
Since the holiday season is a prime time for fraudsters to send malicious Emails in an attempt to cause computer damage or to compromise sensitive information stored on your computer network, take extra care not to click on attachments or links contained in suspicious looking Emails. Be on guard for any Emails that claim to require immediate response or just don’t seem right, because they are likely to be spam or worse and can potentially harm your computer network at a time when no one can afford to have system downtime.
Since this Phishing Email seems to be widespread, please take a moment to share this post with friends, family and colleagues so they can avoid falling for this scam. Thanks!