What email spammers know about you
After decades of annoying us, spam is still one of the most effective ways to spread online threats such as ransomware or scam you into revealing your credit card information.
Ironically, as internet security improves, criminals have become more reliant on spam, flooding billions of email boxes, knowing that only a tiny success rate is enough to keep them in business. And spam works because scammers understand some basic principles of psychology that make a con easy.
Here's what spammers know about you that helps make their dirty work easy:
1. You probably bought something online recently - and almost every time you buy something online, it generates at least one email, if not several.
"E-commerce is now so common it only takes a simple 'Your order cannot be delivered', nothing else is needed," Sean Sullivan, F-Secure Security Advisor, explains.
"The amount of spam pushed practically guarantees that numerous recipients will actually be waiting for a delivery. This explains why even after decades of warnings, we're still falling for spam."
2. You trust your favourite brands.
F-Secure Labs analysed its spam traps and found in the first half of this year these are the companies that are most likely to be spoofed by spammers: Amazon; PayPal; Apple; Microsoft; Eharmony; Facebook and Match.com.
What do all these names have in common? They're brands you may love and likely interact with regularly, possibly on a daily basis.
"There are so many people that have relationships with these companies, it makes these the most successful ones to imitate in spam," says Sean.
3. Enough of us will keep clicking on zip files, attachments and links in spam to keep crooks in business.
Your webmail and work mail are probably pretty good at keeping spam out of your inbox, which counterintuitively makes us more likely to click on the things that can infect us in spam. When we interact with small amounts of spam, we just tend to trust the email that makes its way to us.
The old advice of "never click on anything in an email you weren't expecting" is as important now as ever. But if that advice were enough, we wouldn't be writing this post! So also, always keep your system, browser and security software updated.
As a TalkTalk customer you can try SuperSafe internet security for FREE on the first device (worth £39 a year) and SuperSafe Boost, which protects up to eight devices for only £2 a month (worth £99 for a year).
Just log in to My Account, select the package you want and you will receive an email from F-Secure to install it on to your device.