Stay Safe Online

Online criminals are financially motivated to steal your information, whether or not they know who you are. They dress the part, talk the talk, and by pretending to be something or someone they’re not, they try to get your personal details. A phishing website or message tries to trick you into revealing personal information by appearing to be from a legitimate source, such as a bank, social network, or even Google. We’re always on the lookout for phishing attempts, fake sites and Internet scams and we protect web users from visiting malicious sites roughly 3 million times every day.

It’s always worth taking a second look

It’s good to pay close attention to all sign-in screens online. You should always be wary of any message that asks for your personal information or messages that refer you to a web page asking for these details.

Messages or websites phishing for information might ask you to enter the following details:

• Usernames and passwords
• Social Security numbers
• Bank account numbers
• PINs (Personal Identification Numbers)
• Full credit card numbers
• Your mother’s maiden name
• Your birthday

Here are a few simple steps you can take to protect yourself against phishing:

1. Most importantly, never reply to suspicious emails, tweets, or posts with your personal or financial information. Also, don’t fill out forms or sign-in screens that link from these messages.
2. Never enter your password after following a link in an email or chat that you don’t trust. It’s better to go directly to the site using a trusted bookmark.
3. Don’t send your password via email.
4. Only sign in to your account when you’re 100% sure you’re on the real site. If you’re not quite sure, check the Internet address in your web browser. For example, this is a fake URL:www.goog.le.com
5. Install browser updates promptly, or choose a browser like Chrome that updates automatically to the latest version. Many browsers will warn you if you try to go to a website that is suspected of phishing behavior. Google offers a Safe Browsing API which is used by Firefox, Safari and Chrome. We analyze millions of webpages daily and each year we find hundreds of thousands of phishing pages which we add to the blacklist in the Safe Browsing API that then protects users from these pages.
6. Most email providers, including Gmail, allow you to report suspicious emails and phishing scams. Reporting a message as phishing will prevent that user from sending you more emails, and our abuse team will use the report to help stop similar attacks.