Need a Phishing Primer? We’ve Got Just the Thing

Phishing attacks are the most common security risk your business faces, and if you’re not careful, you (or your employees) could fall victim to them with ease. All it takes is clicking on the wrong link or downloading the wrong file, and boom, your business is dealing with a full-blown security breach. To prevent this, we want to cover some of the major signs you’re dealing with a phishing message and what you can do about it.

Here’s the Lowdown on Phishing Attacks

The phishing attack is a hacker’s favorite tool, and it’s probably not for the reasons you suspect.

Most security solutions these days are so powerful that direct attacks on them are simply impossible without a little time, effort, and luck. Hackers don’t want to rely on these variables, and instead they’ll take any shortcuts possible, including your employees. If your team isn’t paying attention, it’s possible that they’ll hand over credentials without a second thought.

In essence, it’s a return on investment for the hacker; they spend a little time setting up a huge, blanket phishing campaign, and they get some poor suckers who fall for it, while they invest time and energy in other types of attacks.

How a Phishing Attack Works

We’ll give you an example of an everyday occurrence: an invoice for a vendor in your email inbox.

If you check the email and it appears to have all the branding it needs, you might recall that you usually get emails for these payments around this time of the month. You download the attachment, not thinking to check to see who the sender is, and suddenly you have a malware infection to deal with. Even if nothing appears to happen, you could have a backdoor installed on your device, which lets a hacker have their way with your network while you’re none the wiser.

This is a rather simplistic phishing attack, and hackers have gotten more creative with their efforts, leading even the best employees to make mistakes.

Signs of a Phishing Attack

If your team needs a primer on how to identify phishing attacks, we’ve got just the thing:

• The message has poor spelling and grammar: Most attacks originate from somewhere outside the United States.
• An odd or uncharacteristic sense of urgency: If you need to do something right now, it’s probably a scam.
• Unsolicited attachments from unknown senders: Never download a file without first scanning it for viruses; direct it to IT for a safety check.
• Unrecognized email addresses: Check the sender to guarantee their identity, or follow up with a secondary contact like a phone number.
• Something just seems too good to be true: Sorry, we really don’t think you won the lottery or that brand-new car. Now, put your credit card away.

How to Prevent Phishing

If you want to keep your business safe, we recommend two primary actions: protecting your inbox and training your users. You can do both by working with Microtechs. To learn more, call us today at (415) 246-0101.