Christmas time is phishing time

Extra cau­tion is always required towards the year end. There’s a long tra­di­tion of phishing mails over Christmas in par­tic­ular. Due to COVID-19 and dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, these are now even more wide-spread than ever.

Cyber­crim­i­nals use phishing to obtain your access data, for instance for your e-banking facility or online shops. Pro­tect your­self by ...

• never using any links you receive by e-mail, SMS or mes­senger ser­vices, and never scan­ning in any such QR codes to log into your finan­cial insti­tu­tion facility.
• never filling in any forms received by e-mail and asking you to enter log-in information.
• treating any attach­ments received with e-mails and text mes­sages with great caution.
• never dis­closing any con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion, such as pass­words, during tele­phone calls.
• always entering the address for your online ser­vice provider or finan­cial institution’s log-in page man­u­ally via the browser address line.
• checking there is an SSL con­nec­tion (https://, lock symbol) when calling up a log-in page, and ver­i­fying that the Internet address shown in the address bar of your browser actu­ally indi­cates that you have reached the cor­rect page.
• con­tacting your finan­cial insti­tu­tion if you are not quite sure or some­thing is not com­pletely clear.