Phishing. Certainly not the same as fishing, but the hacker is certainly "fishing" for information from you. Hence, phishing is "a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious software on the victim's infrastructure like ransomware."-Wikipedia
We have all recently received emails and texts claiming that an account will be deactivated due to some circumstance or another. I'm going to show you how to instantly know that the sender is a fraud.
TEXTS
I have personally been receiving several of these per week, and it seems that the majority are from those who are trying to impersonate Apple. Here is what one looks like. Notice the highlighted red squares--- the sender's address makes no sense and shows nothing with anything related to Apple. The link they are asking you to click on is a shortened URL with no information telling me it's Apple computer.
Now look at the copyright section at the bottom of the text. Apple Computer is located in Cupertino, California. Hollyhill Industrial Estate is located in Ireland, and although Apple has a location there, they would NEVER send a text or email for verification if there was a problem with you account.
Whenever you receive an email with either a special prize offer or a warning about a problem with your account, click on the sender's email so it opens for you to view the full address. Notice that Kohl's is really not Kohl's based on the ridiculous and non-sensical address shown at the right. The sender also cc'd a jgreller at aol and Sprint did not encrypt the message. I reported the email as spam and blocked the address from future emails.
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