Why are vaccination scams a thing now?

Now that vaccinations for the COVID-19 virus are rolling out across Ireland, across Europe and across the world, there is going to be a lot of information out there about how people can gain access to vaccinations in their various countries.

Now as it’s a time of crisis with the virus still being very, very active, the bad guys are going to take advantage of this crisis to confuse people and get them to fall victim to scams that are relating to vaccinations.

What will they look like?

They’ll be putting out messages on WhatsApp or on Facebook or on Messenger, even in emails and text messages. They’d be telling you to:

• “Click here to get information about how you get vaccinated in your country.”
• “Give us some money to register for this service.”
• “Give me all of your personal details.”

These are the types of scams that they are going to try on people.

So what should I do?

So don’t believe anything you get in a message or an email, whether its a WhatsApp text message or Messenger, anything like that on social media, don’t believe any information you see there, unless it is coming from official government or national health service sources. Like in Ireland that would be the HSE. So only get the information about vaccinations from those sources not social media.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

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Contact us for more information at info@L2CyberSecurity.com.

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The post #WeekendWisdom 060 Vaccination Scams appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..

This week we have seen a significant increase in smishing attempts for Bank of Ireland customers. Now if you’re not a Bank of Ireland customer you won’t fall for this.

But smishing is like phishing it’s where you receive a text message that wants you to take some action. That action will actually end up compromising you, usually the action is to click a link.

So what do Bank of Ireland Smishing Scams look like?

So here you can see an example of the type of text messages that have been going around this week. It says that your Visa card has been deactivated and that you need to click on this link to sort the issue out.

Now, if you click on the link it will take you to what looks very very much like the genuine Bank of Ireland website to login. But it’s obviously not. So once you type in your user ID and date of birth, it will then pop up something similar to this.

Where it looks to ask you for lots of personal information. Name, address, telephone number, date of birth, mothers maiden name, where you grew up, an email address and this can all be used against you, by people, they might be able to get access to your account.

Anything else?

They might even be cheeky enough to capture your Visa card information including the 3 digit security code. And really cheeky they even say that if you have the Verified by Visa turned on, if you say yes, that they’ll ask you for your verified by Visa card password. That way they can end up completely controlling your accounts.

Banks don’t send emails or text messages with things on them for you to click. Just ignore them.

So that’s it for this week. Let’s be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

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The post #WeekendWisdom 025 Bank of Ireland Smishing Scams appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..

Now that Coronavirus has been declared a pandemic, people are going to be having a sense of fear, uncertainty and doubt all across the world about this and how it might affect them and their families, which is understandable.

So what type of Coronavirus Scams are there?

This is what the criminals are going to try now and exploit. The desire for people to get more and more information about Coronavirus. So they will send out lots and lots of emails to everybody with links or buttons that you need to click or there will be documents or PDFs attached to those emails.

And they will be encouraging you to open these by saying “important information here from the WHO” or your national health organisation. And they’re expecting you to click on those and these will then compromise your computer.

So don’t fall for these type of information scams. Your national health organisation will probably communicate with you through the normal national media. So get your news from reputable sources.

Anything else?

Also there might be attempts to scam people who are in a work from home situation and that they’re out of their usual zone and they’re communicating in slightly different ways with their colleagues.

So you might end up receiving an email from a colleague with some instruction maybe to make a payment or again open an attachment that might be compromised. This email will come maybe from a personal email account and not the normal corporate email account.

So if you get instructions like that in a work from home environment, call that colleague and verify the instruction is valid.

So that’s it for this week. Let’s be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

www.L2CyberSecurity.com

www.twitter.com/L2Cyber

The post #WeekendWisdom 019 Coronavirus Scams appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..