How Office helps protect you from phishing schemes

In this post I will show that how ms-office helps to prevent online fraud and  phishing . In this we will see what phishing is and includes tips on how to identify phishing schemes and follow best practices to avoid becoming a victim of online fraud.

Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to deceive users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies. Phishing is typically carried out by e-mail spoofing and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one.

The purpose of these spoofed messages is to trick you into providing,{personal identity information pII} such as the following:

•   Name and user name Address and telephone number
•   Password or PIN
•   Bank account number
•   ATM/debit or credit card number
•   Credit  card validation code (CVC)or card verification value (CVV)
•   Social Security Number (SSN)

  How Office helps protect you from phishing schemes

Suspicious links in documents

By default, the 2007 Office release displays security alerts in the following situations:

•   You have a document open and you click a link to a Web site with an address that has a potentially spoofed domain name.

  You open a file from a Web site with an address that has a potentially spoofed domain name.

The following alert appears when you click a link to a Web site that uses a potentially spoofed domain name.

 You can then choose whether to continue to visit the Web site.

Suspicious links in e-mail messages

By default, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 does the following to a suspicious message:

  If the Junk E-mail Filter does not consider a message to be spam but does consider it to be phishing, the message is left in the Inbox, but any links in the message are disabled and you cannot use the Reply and Reply All functionality.

  If the Junk E-mail Filter considers the message to be both spam and phishing, the message is automatically sent to the Junk E-mail folder. Any message sent to the Junk E-mail folder is converted to plain text format and all links are disabled. In addition, the Reply and Reply All functionality is disabled. The InfoBar alerts you to this change in functionality.

If you click a link that was disabled in a phishing message, the following Outlook Security dialog box appears.

If you want to continue to be alerted to potential security risks, click OK. If you don't want to keep getting the warning, select the Please do not show me this dialog again check box.

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