Protecting yourself from spammers

We take spam very seriously. As many of us have experienced it is, unfortunately, a fact of Internet life. Sometimes spammers use well recognized brands such as LinkedIn to try and trick users into visiting fraudulent websites.

In the past few days, we’ve noticed an increase in phishing emails doing the rounds using the LinkedIn name. As you can imagine, we are working round the clock with leading email service providers to combat this problem.

Here are some tips on how you can protect your account as well as your connections’ accounts from spammers:

• Please use caution when clicking or opening emails, seemingly from sites you trust.
• Spammers try to mimic legitimate emails, but they often make mistakes like typos or include information that’s not relevant to you. Be suspicious of emails that include names you don’t recognize.
• Keep in mind that a site like LinkedIn would never ask you to open an email attachment or install a software update.
• These spurious emails can infect your computer with virus or spyware. To protect yourself, make sure you have anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed and it is up-to-date.
• Before clicking on a link in an email, place your cursor over the link to verify that they lead to the appropriate site.
• When in doubt, open a new browser window and go directly to LinkedIn.com to check your inbox and verify the connection request or message.
• Learn more about how to avoid scams by visiting educational sites here, here and here.

Spammers have been around for a while, and our focus is to continue working with our partners and leading email service providers to make the web safer for all of us. We urge you to flag any abnormal activity as soon as you see it by emailing safety@linkedin.com so we can address it as swiftly as we can.