Phishing

• The sender's address is suspicious.
• The "To" field is blank or for another person.
• The email includes typos or grammatical errors.
• The message contains an urgent request for personal information.
• The message requires immediate action to avoid a problem like losing access to your TMU account.
• When you hover over a link or button in the email, it directs you to an address (usually suspicious) unrelated to the text in the link.

Even when a sender looks legitimate, pay attention to:

• Improper greetings or language—often, emails from colleagues won’t start with formal greetings and most organizations typically will not use casual language.
• Whether the email is trying to manipulate you by:
  • Demanding urgent action (e.g. asking you to pay for or buy something immediately), 
  • Offering something too good to be true (e.g. you’ve won a lottery); or
  • Presenting a fake TMU login page that steals your username and password once you’ve entered them.
• Whether any links are genuine. Before clicking, check a link’s true URL by hovering your cursor over it—the true source will show at the bottom of your browser. On a mobile device, you can press and hold the link (rather than tap). If the URL is unfamiliar or differs from what you expected, don’t click.

Find more tips for identifying and guarding against sophisticated phishing attacks

Spear phishing is a tactic that targets a specific person by sending fraudulent emails that include personal or relatable information about the victim, tricking them into believing the email is legitimate.

Such phish can also lead to account takeover or account compromise. Once an account is successfully hijacked, cybercriminals can then increase the impact of their attack by targeting people in the contact list of the compromised account.

Here’s what you can do:

• Be alert to your emotions, especially if you feel suspicious, rushed or alarmed. Hackers often evoke these feelings in hopes you’ll do what they ask without taking the time to think first.
• If there are links provided in the email, ensure they don’t lead you to a login page where your username, password or other personal details could be stolen once you enter them. 
  • Before clicking, check a link’s true URL by hovering your cursor over it—the true source will show at the bottom of your browser. On a mobile device, you can press and hold the link (rather than tap).If the URL is unfamiliar or differs from what you expected, don’t click.
• Pay attention to visual cues on websites you’re sent to. Red flags include URLs that don’t match the URL of an official site, spelling and grammatical errors, poor formatting and images and logos that are stretched or blurry.

Learn more tips for spotting phish from trusted sources and spear phishing attacks

Here is an example where the sender is pretending the email is from a TMU address, but the actual address is really from uniswa.szabc.

Here is an example of an email that claims to be from FedEx where the actual address is from specweldfab.revitalsite.comabc.

It’s always worth taking a moment to carefully check the full email address of the sender.

Here is part of an urgent request that included a link to a fake TMU login page:

Here’s another example of an urgent request:

Both of these fake messages include tell-tale grammatical errors and demand you take action to avoid losing access to your account.

Hovering over a link with your mouse and carefully checking the URL is one of the best ways to detect a phishing email. If you are using a tablet or smartphone carefully press and hold the link, rather than tap, to reveal the true URL. Here's an example of a link that goes to a fake TMU login page hosted in a server in another country.

If you hover over the link without clicking you will see a very long URL (it may appear in the bottom-left of your browser) like this:

It may remind you of what you see in the location field of your browser when you log into the my.torontomu.ca portal. But it is not the same. Here is the valid address that you see when you login to my.torontomu.ca:

https://cas.torontomu.ca/login?service=https%3A%2F%2Fmy.torontomu.ca%2FLogin

Aside from the fact the fake link is longer, how can you tell which one is a link to a server at TMU and which one is not?

1. The legitimate URL has a forward slash after cas.torontomu.ca/, the fake one has a forward slash after cas.torontomu.ca.eduq.tkabc/.
2. Another give away is that the fake URL starts with http:// while the valid one starts with https://. TMU login pages will always start with the secure https://.

Here is a fake URL that has been well-crafted to look like a TMU address:

https://cas-torontomu.com/login?service=https%3A%2F%3Fmy.torontomu.ca%2FLogin

Notice how a hyphen has replaced the dot. A valid TMU host name that isn’t simply https://www.torontomu.ca must end with .torontomu.ca/

Let's look at two Fedex URLs. Which one takes you to a Fedex site and which one to somewhere more dangerous?

1. https://www.fedex.com/apps/myprofile/loginandcontact/?locale=en_ca
2. http://www.fedex.info.szabc/apps/myprofile/loginandcontact/?locale=en_ca

To tell the difference, locate the first forward slash after the https://:

1. https://www.fedex.com/apps/myprofile/loginandcontact/?locale=en_ca
2. http://www.fedex.info.szabc/apps/myprofile/loginandcontact/?locale=en_ca

The first link takes you to the real fedex.com site. The second just has Fedex in the name.

If you aren't sure about a link, type a link that you know is correct like my.torontomu.ca or fedex.com into the location bar of your browser instead of clicking.

The TMU community makes extensive use of Google Workspace apps including Drive, Calendar, and Groups. The URLs for these applications can be very long but they all start with a host name that ends with .google.com:

• https://drive.google.com/
• https://docs.google.com/
• https://calendar.google.com/

The host name always ends before the first forward slash with .google.com/

Some attackers have used personal Google accounts and Google Forms to try to get people to "login" to a Google Form. This is relatively easy to spot because Google Forms don't look like TMU's or Google's login screens. Google has even added a warning at the bottom of every Google Form that says: "Never submit passwords through Google Forms."

Hackers can also target you by directing you to malicious phishing websites or contact you via your mobile devices.

• Learn how to spot and avoid fraudulent phishing websites.
• Tips for identifying and guarding against sophisticated phishing attacks