LinkedIn accounts for half of all phishing scams globally

Phishing scams used to arrive almost exclusively by email in the past. Texts that tried to trick us into clicking on some malicious link in order to fill in some form data giving confidential information, which would help criminals to steal our properties.

Over time, email has been losing prominence, and social networks have taken over the throne, with more personalized messages, to make it easier to deceive the victim.

We can receive a message on Facebook that mentions known people, for example, making the content realistic, or a Linkedin contact that tries to deceive us in some way.

In fact, in the first quarter of this year, Linkedin was already the cause of 52% of phishing scams in the world, which makes it clear that it is one of the preferred channels for cybercriminals.

Why scammers choose Linkedin seems clear, as it is where users freely enter personal information. On the other hand, many links that we receive from other sites point to sites similar to Linkedin, to give seriousness to the subject.

The rest of the top ten are all companies known on a global scale. In second position is DHL with 14%, and Google with 7%, all far from Linkedin’s 52%.

Even so, Linkedin emails continue to have misspellings, bad grammar and other errors, such as typos, since the person who writes them usually does not speak our language, or has not had time to learn it correctly.

You have to be very careful with emails that are presented as urgent, often these will say that there has been a problem and that we change the password. When an email is received with the word URGENT; you have to breathe twice and verify the topic, including with phone calls or with analysis of the included links.

Any email that may be asking for personal information or takes us to a website that does, is already suspected of fraud. Remember that scammers are good at creating websites similar to Linkedin, gmail, facebook and others.

Finally, beware of email attachments, especially an unexpected one, analyze well before opening it, especially if they promise to be invoices or shipping notices.