Display Name Spoofing Policy

Phishing is when a cybercriminal attempts to impersonate another user or another organization to steal a target’s credentials and personal information.

A cybercriminal will contact the target via email, telephone, or text message posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals to provide sensitive information like passwords, banking information and credit card details.

Too Good To Be True - Lucrative offers and eye-catching or attention-grabbing statements are designed to attract people’s attention immediately. For instance, many claim that you have won an iPhone, a lottery, or some other lavish prize. Just don't click on any suspicious emails. Remember that if it seems to good to be true, it probably is!

Sense of Urgency - A favorite tactic amongst cybercriminals is to ask you to act fast because the super deals are only for a limited time. Some of them will even tell you that you have only a few minutes to respond. When you come across these kinds of emails, it's best to just ignore them. Sometimes, they will tell you that your account will be suspended unless you update your personal details immediately. Most reliable organizations give ample time before they terminate an account and they never ask patrons to update personal details over the Internet. When in doubt, visit the source directly rather than clicking a link in an email.

Hyperlinks - A link may not be all it appears to be. Hovering over a link shows you the actual URL where you will be directed upon clicking on it. It could be completely different or it could be a popular website with a misspelling, for instance www.bankofarnerica.com - the 'm' is actually an 'r' and an 'n', so look carefully.

Attachments - If you see an attachment in an email you weren't expecting or that doesn't make sense, don't open it! They often contain payloads like ransomware or other viruses. The only file type that is always safe to click on is a .txt file.

Unusual Sender - Whether it looks like it's from someone you don't know or someone you do know, if anything seems out of the ordinary, unexpected, out of character or just suspicious in general don't click on it!

A display name is the first and last name that shows in the from field of an email.

Your display name can be different from your username and email address.

Display Name Spoofing is the most common type of phishing attack. A cybercriminal alters the first and last name, the display name, of their message to make their message look like it is coming from a trusted source.

The first and last name in the from field appears to match a known sender, but the actual sending email address does not match the legitimate email for the source.

These types of attack are especially dangerous since many people do not inspect the actual sending address and mobile devices often hide the sender’s address by default.

Here’s an example:

You receive an email claiming to be from Jerry Sweat.

The name for the sender displays as Jerry Sweat, but the actual email address is pastor123@gmail.com.

This email is not legitimate! A cybercriminal has spoofed the display name to appear as Jerry Sweat, but the actual address does not end in the correct domain BeachChurchJax.com.

Without going into too many specifics, our detection technology scans to see where an email that contains a staff member’s display name originated from. If the email contains a staff member’s display name and is from outside our orginization, the message is automatically quarantined.

Yes, this updated policy will not change where you can send emails from. Our email server does not use your device or physical location to determine if an email is internal or external to our organization.

Yes, this updated policy will not change the devices you can send emails from. Our email server does not use your device or physical location to determine if an email is internal or external to our organization.

Use your Microsoft 365 account provided by Beach Church to send all official emails. Messages that are sent in your name, but do not originate from your Microsoft 365 account, or your approved delegate’s accounts, will be quarantined.

No, you can not use any email other than your corporate address ending in BeachChurchJax.com to email Beach Church staff members. Emails sent from your personal email address will be quarantined because they originated from outside our organization. This also means you can not use your personal email address to send emails to your own corporate address. This is a limitation of our detection technology.

We strongly recommend that you only use your corporate email address for conducting church business with other staff members and with external recipients. Our corporate email system is designed to best represent our brand and offers more security features than personal emails typically do.

Yes, you can still receive messages from external senders, as long as their display name does not match a user inside of our organization.

In the unlikely event that a legitimate external contact shares the same display name as a user in our organization, an administrator will review the message and release it from quarantine.

We have updated our domain records to allow most approved 3rd party services to send emails as if they originated from inside our organization. This means that messages sent from approved 3rd party services should not be quarantined. We are still working to improve our detection technology and there are some limitations to how 3rd party services can integrate with our system.

An administrator will always review quarantined messages and can release messages that are false positives.

Hosted quarantine is an isolated location on our email server that temporary holds suspicious messages for review. Normally, only administrators can access quarantine and decide what happens to these messages.

The idea is similar to how a potentially ill person may be quarantined away from healthy people to prevent disease from spreading until a medical professional can examine them.

If an email fails certain automated security checks and is believed to be potentially malicious, the email is separated from normal mail and delivered to quarantine to prevent it from spreading malware. This is different from how a spam or junk folder works because the message is intercepted before the intended recipient’s mailbox is able to process rules on the email.

Depending on why a message was quarantined, the intended recipient may receive a notification that an email has been quarantined, but this is not always the case. Most of the time, an administrator will have to review the message and decide to either release the message to the recipient’s mailbox, or report the message as phishing to the proper authorities.