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Just make sure you NEVER click on anything in the email EVER not even just out of curiosity.
There are a surprisingly large number of intelligent people who will click on the links anyway, and I've then spent weeks recoverying their hard drives and rebuilding a clean OS for them. Sounds laughable but just dont.
Odds are when they send out bulk emails like this some of the recipients WILL use paypal or have a commonwealth bank account or whatever the email claims. So those people get worried and open up the links to check. If you are such a person JUST DONT touch the email, dont delete it either move it to a junk folder out of the way and go to the Paypal or bank website and look for a contact method and ASK them about your account directly. Some sites will have an area for people receiving spam to see examples of spam emails and explaining the organisation's process of how or if it contacts clients. Nobody will EVER contact you to confirm your password, they dont have access to see it themselves as its never stored in plain text its always encrypted. Its why you might have a PIN number (for ATMs), an Internet banking password and a phone banking password, so no one password. Because they get encrypted directly ito the appropriate system and compared against the store encrypted string for verification. Phone banking is the weak point as you are verbally giving your password to a person and they enter it at there end to validate your account but it won't get them access to your PIN or Internet banking passwords so theft is difficult for them get away with. They have their personal login inside the bank and when they access your account details weith your phone banking password that is all logged, so if they do steal its all traceable back to them. Your PIN and Internet banking are the vital private keys a thief wants which is why the emails send you to a page made to look like the bank site where YOU then freely give them the information to steal your money. So just don't ever do anything except follow your normal method to contact your bank or whatever, NEVER follow instructions in the email to contact or anything. May be a pain in the butt but better than the alternative if you clicked on anything in the email.
Safe practices include never having just one email, have free "throwaway" emails to use if you feel you must. I have an email with my ISP of course and only a few close friends know it, I never use it to register on a forum or online stores, I have a gmail account for general email usage and another gmail account I use for website registration and I rarely look at the inbox, I don't ever expect legit emails to that address (of course I never type my email in any form in forums or comments or anything). If that account gets flooded with spam I can just start another throwaway acount to use instead. Gmail is pretty good with spam isolation these days so its very rare any get through to my regular gmail account. My ISP email never gets any that isn't a brute force address (where a script has generated every combination of letters/numbers as possible names of addresses and added to a domain list to spam emais).
So, have email addresses for different purposes and at least one for one off uses that you can abandon. Be mindfull when you give out contact details and why. This post is for all those people who might read this thread but won't post to it.
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