What is Difference Between Spam and Phishing | Spam vs Phishing
What is Difference Between Spam and Phishing :- It doesn’t matter, from which profession you belongs. Either you belongs to student, businessman or any office worker, emails will be the most important part of your life. Due to the drastic increment in the digitalization day -to- day, the spammers & scammers criminals targeting more users to scam or spam than past years.
Spam and phishing both are related to social engineering and in general term we can say, it is an activity in which an attacker initiates manipulate your personal information such as: Passwords, account IDs, social security etc.
The phishing belongs to steal login credentials or a sensitive data while the spamming belongs to a method of dealing products and services by sending unsolicited emails and generating large-scale generic campaigns.
Due to a great advancements in technology, it makes everything from banking to communication system most faster and convenient but it also gives a side effect as to find more creative ways to hack and scam by cybercriminals.
Today’s in this article What is Difference Between Spam and Phishing, I am going to mention most relevant information about the term What is Difference Between Spam and Phishing. This article mostly focuses on What is Difference Between Spam and Phishing, what is phishing, What is spam, how to prevent it.
What is a spam?
Spam (junk mail) is an unsolicited (which means recipient didn’t ask for it) and junk email which is sent in bulk to mass number of people. Sometimes it is used as an advertising method. It is generally sent with a generated harmful links, malware, malicious software and harmful attachments or misleading content. Its main aim is to obtain confidential information such as social security data, bank account information and get an access to your computer.
You will found most of the spam emails are related to Travel, Free Product, Loans and discount and these emails mostly uses social engineering techniques to deceive the recipient which is known as “phishing” email.
What is Phishing?
Phishing is a type of fraud or cyber attack which is a form of social engineering . It involves an attempts to get an access to victim’s personal accounts or sensitive information by deceive passwords or personal information. The cybercriminals use emails, the instant message and social media to collect information like login credentials. The phishing attacks are generally appears as a communications which comes from a reliable source of authority and trust and the message is intended to trick his personal or financial information by installing malware on his device.
What is Difference Between Spam and Phishing
Followings are the major differences between spam & phishing:
| S.NO | Spam Mail | Phishing Mail |
| 1. | It refers to junk email and unsolicited messages which is sent in bulk by email and used for advertisement purposes. | It refers to a fraudulent emails which is designed to steal user’s private information and data. |
| 2. | It is a form of commercial advertising which is used to flood users’ email inbox. | It is a type of social engineering attack having a desire to gain confidential information. |
| 3. | The spam emails neither targeted to a single person nor contains any salutation with person’s name. | The phishing emails are targeted to a person which contains a salutation with person’s name. |
| 4. | It is generally a junk mail that invades your inbox. | It isn’t just only about emails. |
| 5. | The spam emails do not have so many different goals such as an attempt to hack a network or infect it with malware, acquire sensitive information. | phishing emails have so many different goals such as an attempt to hack a network or infect it with malware, acquire sensitive information. |
| 6. | It is used for commercial content. | It is used for tough social engineering techniques. |
How to get prevented from spam and phishing attacks?
Note the following items carefully when are in doubt about an email you have received.
- Check the email id more number of times like two-three times when it asked you to share any personal details. You have to also cross verify it by typing this email id into Google. If it’s really belongs to any well-known company then it will appear in search results. Along with this you can also verify through making a call to the company and make sure either it’s authentic or not.
- Check the URL of the web site very carefully on request of any types of personal information. Cross check the spelling error in the URL as never two URLs identical of two different web sites.
- Don’t click on suspicious material: There is a thumb rule to avoid phishing emails, never download any attachment with email or not click on any link in the email when it belongs to any unknown source.
- Enable Email Filtering: There are some email filtering software are available which analyzes incoming emails, if it find any spam or phishing contents then it moves to a separate folder automatically. Various emails facility providers have inbuilt spam filter which automatically deletes all these type of content within a specified period of time on enable a setting. If you belongs to any business then it is most essential to use email filtering to boost employee productivity better protect your network.
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