How do I report a phishing email?

 If you’ve ever had someone access any of your online accounts without your consent, you know what a pain it can be. Depending on what is accessed, it can range from being annoying to being a huge problem.

So when you get a phishing email that’s trying to steal your login information, how do you report it so that others aren’t taken advantage of?

Let’s look at how to spot a phishing email, then how to report it.

How to spot a phishing email

In this day and age, if you have an email address you’re going to receive a phishing email at some point. If it isn’t filtered out by your email client as spam, you’ll need to watch out!

We’ve talked before about tips to avoid phishing attacks. But you can look for a few key signs:

• It’s from a well-known company but has misspellings
• When you hover over links in the email before clicking on them, they don’t belong to the organization that sent the email
• They ask for sensitive information like a password or bank account number

How to report a phishing email

In the United States, US-CERT partners with the international coalition known as the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). US-CERT collects phishing emails and related website addresses to help people not be taken advantage of.

Want to report a phishing email to the APWG and US-CERT? You can do so by sending an email to phishing-report@us-cert.gov.

If you have an IT department or an IT company you work with, then you should probably notify them when you receive a phishing email. They can help protect the rest of your organization as well as any other organizations they work with.

Are you a customer of ours? Reach out to us and we would be happy to let you know our email address you can forward phishing emails to.

Remember, be cautious if an email looks at all suspicious. If the email is from a website you actually use, remember to open your browser and type in the address for the site. If you don’t see the same warning, then it was likely a phishing email.