How to spot email spoofing in Microsoft Outlook

How do you know you’re talking to the person you think you’re talking to?

When using Microsoft Outlook for sending and receiving emails, here are a few things you should know.

Outlook will show you the name of known contacts, hiding the email address from the email you received.

This can be a security issue since hackers are able to disguise themselves as a known person in your contacts.

By hovering over the name in the email, Outlook will show you the full email address to ensure you’re talking to the right person.

It’s important to remember that names and email signatures are not difficult to fake.

To take it a step further, email addresses can also be faked (or spoofed) by masking themselves under another email address.

You can verify the email address by hovering over the name and looking for a “via tag” which would show a different email address. If you see the via tag, that means there’s another email address associated with the received email.

The ‘first contact safety tip” is a yellow highlighted message that will alert you if you haven’t received an email from that sender. If you see a familiar person’s name but this alert shows up, you should be suspicious.

There’s another tag (yellow banner) that will show up if Outlook notices an email that came from someone outside your organization.

Seeing any of these signs doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being hacked but these tips will help create awareness for you, your team and your organization.

For more videos on how to secure your Microsoft 365 environment, visit our series here.