There’s no need to panic! Your Netflix account has likely not been disabled and you can still binge watch all your favorite shows on the weekend. However, there is a phishing scam going around trying to make you believe you are in danger of your House of Cards crumbling or being imprisoned without your Orange Is The New Black. If you fall for it, you will give up your banking credentials and may just be left with an empty bank account.
This one looks very realistic. It uses the Netflix logo and verbiage and asks you to click a nice big red button to update your account information. It’s actually a link to a malicious website. If you enter your login credentials and put in your billing information, you’ve been duped.
For this and any online account, if you need to update your details, go directly into your account by using a previously bookmarked link or by carefully typing the URL into the address bar of your browser. There is no need to click links in email messages to do such important modifications to accounts that have your sensitive information, such as your payment card details.
If you have fallen for this, change your Netflix password right away. Make sure it is unique to that one site and includes upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. Make it difficult to guess and don’t use words that can be quickly deciphered by a brute force dictionary attack. This is a trial and error method done with software that hackers use to crack passwords. If the password is weak, this can be successful in very short order. That’s why the more difficult your passwords, the less at risk you are of them being cracked.
Other clues that an email may be phishing:
- Misspelled words, poor grammar, and poor punctuation
- You hover your mouse pointer over the link and the URL goes to an address that is suspicious
- The logos are blurry or outdated
- You are not expecting to receive a link
If you take these precautions, you can avoid becoming a victim of this and other phishing scams.
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