Millions of Americans recently hosted friends, made big pots of chili, and gathered around television sets to watch Super Bowl LIII. While there was a lot of prep on the viewers’ side, imagine the prep hours spent by the athletes playing in the game. Their dedication to drills, film study, and situation preparedness. Their preparation for relentless assaults, powerful counterattacks, and trick plays. Cybersecurity is a lot like football.

The global energy grid is an optimal first strike for any malicious military or economic campaign. And it doesn’t take an “army” to make it happen. Even worse, because of the breadth (over 3,200 energy utilities companies in America) and the varying cyber maturity of smaller utilities, sophisticated hackers have already mapped our Energy Grid.

Because Phishing Email attacks are always evolving, below are 6 types of phishing attacks to watch out for in 2019.

1) Vishing (voice + phishing = vishing): Vishing is an attempt to obtain private and sensitive information over the phone. Scammers use robots or real people to call and convince victims to share their information. Majority of reputable government entities, organizations or companies will not ask for personal information over the phone. 

Phishing is an attempt to obtain sensitive, and confidential information by tricking the email recipient into believing the source of the email is reputable and the action they want you to take (like clicking on a link) is logical.

Tax fraud takes many forms, such as W2 phishing hacks, identity theft through access to your social security number, or other information breaches. Last year, we blogged about the 3 tips to know before filing taxes. With the tax season well underway, let’s revisit the tips and explore additional guidelines.

Here are 5 tips to make sure that you are taking proper precautions:

1. File your taxes as soon as possible.