E-mail scams have become more and more sophisticated, and we at DGL Practice Manager are increasingly concerned about protecting our customers and their understanding of email security. We can put as many sophisticated scanners, anti-virus programs and spam filters in place but sometimes a rotten apple will sneak through with the good ones.
The way to ensure that nothing malicious happens when that bad e-mail does sneak in is to make sure that you and your colleagues are fully aware of best practices in email security. To help, we’ve put together a simple guide below which you can share with your staff and colleagues.
E-mail Security guide:
Follow the simple rules below, and you’ll drastically reduce the risks associated with emails scams:
- The sender is crucial – If you don’t recognise the name of the sender, DO NOT open the e-mail. Just delete it.
- Ignore the unexpected – E-mail scams are clever pieces of social engineering, so they will often tell you that “You have a missed parcel” or “You’re due a rebate from HMRC”. If you’re not expecting a parcel, a tax rebate, or any other interesting sounding event then it’s probably a scam. Ignore it completely, unless you’re 100% sure it’s genuine (and then use extra vigilance)
- If you’re asked to open an attachment, don’t! – E-mails are a very easy way for nefarious people to spread viruses, especially when they have a brand new virus that’s not being detected by common anti-virus systems yet. If an e-mail you’re not expecting (or from someone you don’t know well) asks you to open an attachment, DO NOT open it. The most common dangerous e-mail attachments are .zip files – as they can contain executable/virus infected files.
- Don’t click strange links… or any links – To bypass spam and virus filters, the scammers will often send you an e-mail asking you to download a file/document online. DO NOT click these links. It’s also common to see scam financial/shopping e-mails, asking you to click through and confirm your details (these are known as phishing e-mails). Many e-mail security programs will not pick all of these up, and they are made to look just like an official e-mail from PayPal, or Amazon, or your bank. Once again, DO NOT click any links in these e-mails. If you need to visit or check your PayPal account, type the address into the top of your internet browser on your own local system and not within the DGL Hosted environment (www.paypal.com for example) rather than clicking through from an e-mail.
- If the e-mail seems fishy, odd, or too good to be true, then delete it
Additional Information: Clanwilliam Health (DGL) Ltd, would like to inform all users that the DGL Hosted Platform is provided as a service to manage your practice and is not intended for personal web browsing and/or email communications outside of normal business operations. We request that all personal activities are carried out on the users own personal and/or local PC systems to minimise any risk to your clinical data and the DGL network.