If you get an email from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) this week, be sure to look for the logo before you respond. The association issued a warning yesterday that NAR members are receiving “suspicious emails” designed to appear as if they are from the NAR (they are not) “regarding updates to a member directory.”
The email requests recipients look through an attached directory in PDF format to “ensure your contact information and active Mobile Number [sic] is correctly represented.” The NAR urged anyone who had opened the email, responded to it, or sent in updated information “immediately change their nar.realtor passwords and other related passwords.”
While this email appears to target realtors, every investor can learn a few valuable lessons from it:
- Confirm senders before responding to emails
Often, hackers will send you emails that appear official or from trusted associations of which you are a member, such as the NAR or a local real estate investors’ association or meetup. They assume you will simply respond with some sort of information that might enable them to learn key things about you that might enable them to figure out confidential information, passwords, and pin codes. - Do not send private information over unsecured lines of communication.
As a real estate investor, you likely have access to a great deal of private information about tenants, buyers, or sellers if you are actively doing deals. If you get hacked, those individuals are, by extension, potentially hacked as well. Make sure you use professionally secured methods of communicating closing information, bank data, and other confidential materials. - Don’t open mysterious attachments, and definitely don’t fill them out!
Just opening some attachments could give hackers access to your computer or certain files, and entering your username and password into a fake login screen in order to open an attachment is a great way to make a hacker’s job really, really easy. If you have any doubts about the origin of a document, steer clear.
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