BTW, when communicating with these Government websites, it is not done by email. Submitting (mandatory) forms and requesting information is all done directly on their websites. No email transactions.
Okay. So, still applying my simple-minded logic, I still see things that would worry me if this was my situation.
1. The Phishers know when ever I communicate with these two sites.
2. Of the three, I am the common denominator.
3. The odds of the two government sites both being infected but me being clean, low.
4. The odds of me being infected, greater.
5. The odds of me being infected deliberately by someone in my office, zero.
However, I would have to consider if a malicious force snuck into my system unseen, which is always a possibility. Do you use any software that maintains a sentry, or software with which you periodically sweep your drives to see if anyone got past your sentry?
As I understand it, sneaking in undetected may not be difficult. For example, you or your staff could have received an email from a friendly source with an innocuous image attached, but the image could contain (unknown to your friend) code that installs an invader on your system.
I am just a private individual but I still take precautions and use such software because I worry about receiving such emails, and worry about things I could pick up unknowingly just traveling the internet. I don't want anything to be looking at my private information.
Let me give you a very recent example that happened with a colleague of mine, who is very careful about where he travels on the internet et cetera. A bug was placed on his machine and it remained for quite a while as someone observed his correspondence. Then, when he was traveling abroad, his investment advisor got an email (written in the style my friend would write) asking to transfer funds to a foreign account. Fortunately his advisor was suspicious and contacted my friend by phone.
So, back to the software question. Do you have a sentry and do you periodically sweep? If not, you might want to consider it.
Again, I think you want to hear from folks on this site who know about this kind of software. It is not a choice to be made lightly as there is some software (even "big name") that can cause other kinds of problems because they are not well written. They seem to be better at advertising their wares.
