With the onslaught of the pandemic, a spike in phishing scams and spam has also emerged—by 667 percent to be exact.

And this is no coincidence—around 2 percent of the attacks have been classified as directly related to COVID-19 in March. The online criminals are attacking remote workforces, corporate systems, and tech vendors, all of whom may be less able to respond due to the current situation. 

The FBI even released a PSA about the attacks, noting to look out for fake emails from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Here are some tips from D Magazine Partners’ own IT guru Luan Aliji on how to spot phishing/spam attacks:

1. Look at the email address, not just the sender. This is the most important as you will notice that it is usually a strange email with different characters and numbers.
2. The message is sent from a public email domain such as google.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, and so on.
3. The domain name is misspelled.
4. The email is written poorly.
5. It includes suspicious links or attachments. Please do not open them.
6. The message creates a sense of urgency.

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