Is 321 Greetings Scam? What To Know as an Employee
It’s 2024 and you just received a 321 greetings in your work email. You’re probably wondering if it’s scam or legit. Should you forward it to the IT department or click on the link?
Understanding 321 Greetings
Here’s what you need to know; 321 greetings is not really a scam perse. It’s a phishing test employers used on employees to find out if they can easily become victims of phishing scams or not. If you’ve received a 321 greetings email, it simply means your employer is conducting a phishing test.
So the best action to take is to flag the email as Spam and report it to the IT department. Now that we’ve established that 321 greetings is not a scam but a phishing test, here’s a brief report on how phishing scams works and how to avoid being a victim.
Learning How Phishing Scams Work as an Employee
Phishing scams is a kind of online scam that targets victims via emails. They’re often made to look like official emails from established sources & businesses. On the body of the email contains a link which recipients are prompted to click on.
Often times, the email appears to be from an internet service provider, a bank, or a delivery company. To untrained eyes, it looks legit, but here’s warning signs to spot;
- Always contains a suspicious link or attachment
- It’s always contains an urgent call to action. The false sense of urgency is just to make you click on the malicious link.
- It is sent from a public domain. For example instead of @netflix.com, phishing emails pretending to be Netflix would come from @gmail.com, @outlook.com, etc.
- Contain spelling or grammatical errors.
What Happens When You Click or Download a Phishing Link/attachment
When you click a link or download an attachment in a phishing email, you have compromised your device. Here’s how;
It may take you to a site that has a malware code/script running in the background that automatically downloads a malicious file that could potentially start running.
When downloading attachments from a phishing email, there can also be malware code/script that will run in the background when the attachment is executed that can do lots of damages. Including: forcing your computer to reach out to a server to download additional malicious files, forcing your machine to open up ports and allowing outsiders to complete intrusions, etc.
See phishing alerts for; Wal Tracking Scam, Delware BPO Scam.