Bank of Ireland have warned customers in the last few weeks that they never request customer login details by email. This follows an increase in phishing scams directed at the bank's customers over the last few weeks.

The scam emails may appear to be from legitimate Bank of Ireland addresses, and request customers to click on a link which supposedly opens an online banking login page on the Bank of Ireland website.

The "login page" will usually ask you to enter your username, customer id and pin number.

Following are some points to keep in mind if you happen to become subject to suspicious e-mails:

• Never trust an e-mail that requests you to enter login details, always be suspicious.
• Bank of Ireland or other banks will never request their customers to enter log in details via e-mail.
• Bank of Ireland will always use an SSL encrypted page when requesting login details. SSL encrypted pages ensure that data sent between your browser and the website's server remains secure (usually through a strong 128-bit encryption key). An SSL enabled page is indicated by a yellow padlock in the bottom right-hand corner of the browser screen (Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox).
• One way to verify a website's identity is to double-click on the yellow padlock and examine the security certificate's properties. Check which organisation it is made out to and that the domain name in your browser's address bar matches that on the certificate.
• Scam websites will barely ever use SSL encryption due to the fact that a certificate costs extra money and an organisation's identity must usually be confirmed before a cert is issued by a trusted cert issuing authority.
• If in any doubt about an e-mail's authenticity, don't follow any links from the e-mail. Instead, manually type the address of the company which supposedly sent you the e-mail in question into your browser's address bar, get a contact telephone number, call, and ask if they may have sent an e-mail like the one you received.

If you receive a suspicious e-mail allegedly from Bank of Ireland, you can also forward this e-mail to Bank of Ireland for verification. The e-mail address to forward such mails to is:

365online@boimail.com


On that note, we wish you continued safe surfing!