Your Employees are Being Targeted By Phishing. Don’t Take the Bait!

It’s hard to tell people that “we are under attack” all the time and actually mean it. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the more you tell people they are under threats that don’t actually affect them, the more distrust or even disdain develops for the issuer of these revelations. Second, people will never actually understand that they are under threat until something happens that proves to them that they need to be more careful. 

This week, we will discuss briefly how to circumvent this and communicate to your staff that cybersecurity is a part of their job.

Data Moves Fast

Everyone knows that data is flying around everywhere inside their business. Sometimes, there’s so much data that is being bandied around that people lose focus or get lost in it. That’s an unfortunate side effect of doing business digitally. Fortunately, it also opens some interesting opportunities. With businesses looking to gain an edge any way they can, data can be used to paint a picture of every part of your business and allow you to make decisions that will ultimately benefit the entire organization.

Some say it takes the personality out of a business, and some of those things are inevitable when a business strives for efficiency. What never loses personality, however, are the ways that hackers and scammers try to siphon information from you and your staff. It stands to reason that people whose focus isn’t on their IT, but what they create, don’t always make the best decisions when it comes to interacting with correspondence and it can have some stark consequences for businesses. Let’s take a look at one of the main ways scammers can go about tricking your staff into putting your network and data at risk.

Phishing

Phishing is one of the most common forms of cyberattacks used by criminals with goals ranging from stealing data to gaining access to an infrastructure. Essentially, a phishing attack is an attempt by a cybercriminal to communicate with your team members in hopes that they will give away important information or allow access to critical systems. Phishing attacks are a natural evolution of cyberattacks that rose in popularity due to the advancement of security standards; while solutions have grown stronger and more difficult to crack, the human mind remains ever-vulnerable.

Phishing emails are the most well-known type of phishing attack, but they also come in other forms, like online forms designed to harvest credentials, SMS messages with infected links, phone calls, and other means of communication. Since phishing attacks can take so many different forms, it’s important that your team knows what to look for in these attempts, as well as how to report them to your trusted IT administrator. 

Let’s go over some of the ways your team members can identify a potential phishing attack.

Signs That a Phishing Attack is Targeting You

There are plenty of warning signs you can use to identify a phishing attack. Here is a short list to consider, but if you have any concerns at all, we hope you will reach out to us at (403) 210-2927 to learn more about them:

• A tone that doesn’t match the supposed sender
• Misspellings and other discrepancies in key details, like email addresses, domain names, and links
• Out-of-the-blue messages
• Egregious spelling and grammar errors
• Unexpected or out-of-context attachments
• Excessive urgency behind, or open threats as a consequence of, not complying with the message
• Ambiguous messages that motivate the recipient to investigate
• Unusual requests, or requests for explicitly sensitive information

It’s incredibly important to know what these warning signs are so you can actively keep a lookout for them. If you don’t, who knows what could happen?

Don’t Let Scammers Win

At OnSite I.T., we can set your organization up with the resources you need to properly train your staff about phishing and other things that can help prioritize your organization’s security. Give us a call today at (403) 210-2927 to learn more.