What is Spam?
Spam is a form of unwanted electronic communication that can lead to identity theft and other problems.
You know it well, an unwanted message, and not just once but dozens of times. Spam is a form of unwanted online communication, such as unsolicited emails, text messages, and social media messages. It is intended to deceive or mislead the recipient by offering them products or services they didn't ask for.
Why avoid spam?
Besides being annoying, spam is also an effective way to deceive people. Especially when people don't know it's a spam message. If a person receives an unsolicited message, this can lead to unwanted and inappropriate communication, or even phishing. That's why it's very important to avoid spam messages, so people can safeguard their privacy and security.
How do you prevent spam?
How can you prevent those annoying spam messages? Unfortunately, we can't completely prevent spam, but there are a number of methods that can make it more difficult for cybercriminals to send spam or phishing emails. The most effective way is to install a spam filter on your email. This filter identifies unwanted messages and removes them from your inbox.
Help your built-in spam filter recognize spam too. The moment you recognize a message as spam, you can ''report it as spam''. Your spam filter learns from your input and can block messages from this sender, or even similar messages, next time.
Why do you become a victim of spam?
The reason you become a victim of spam is often previous data breaches where your data was stolen, but sometimes the cause is a bit closer to home. Suppose you have various social media accounts on which you publicly share your email address or mobile number, then this can easily be found by ''web scrapers'', which scour the entire internet for email and other contact information. Discover what you can do to protect yourself against potential cyberattacks during one of our Cyber Security Awareness Trainings.
Protecting your own domain
As a company, you also have the option to make your own domain more trustworthy (for example, ''www.company.com'' and all emails coming from ''example@company.com''). You'll learn this in our blog about: What is DKIM (DomainKeys)? But also in our blog about What is DMARC? It simply means that you protect your domain from having emails sent by outside parties who ''spoof'' it, but also that the recipient knows the email actually comes from the domain owner.
How vulnerable is your company to a cyberattack? Schedule a Social Engineering test today to find out.