Hello! When I read emails I always pay a lot of attention to suspect messages and so on, but I’m always a bit scared of clicking the wrong link and getting infected by malwares.
What can be some preventive measures I can take to avoid these risks? Perhaps opening links from emails in a different browsers with JavaScript disabled? Soke kind of sandboxing?
I use Thunderbird as mail client
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Unless you’re expecting a mail you should never open any links. Just go to the originating page manually.
You can also hover over the links to see the URL they’re pointing to. If it goes to
y0urbamk.comoryourbank.toinstead ofyourbank.comyou know that something is up. But that can be hard to see with strange Cyrillic letters or so. So manually typing inyourbank.comhelps.My email is mostly used to receive confirmation messages when creating online accounts, recovery links to forgotten passwords, confirmation of purchases, confirmation of banking transactions, etc. These are all cases of mails that arrive as an immediate response to some action I took, so I know they’re legit and don’t fear clicking on their links if necessary to complete my task.
However, I’m more suspecious of mails that I receive unprompted. In these cases I see no reason to go clicking anything, especially if it’s from a company that I have no previous relationship.
These are all cases of mails that arrive as an immediate response to some action I took, so I know they’re legit and don’t fear clicking on their links if necessary to complete my task.
Just be wary of emails that masquerade as something that came from an action you took, but are just phishing, or come attached with malware.
The point is the “timing” of the received mail. If you receive a password reset immediately after requesting one, that’s strong evidence the mail is legit.
