These days you can’t tell if a delivery person is leaving a package or someone, who seems like a delivery person, is stealing a package from your front porch. And just like your IT systems, if there is a weakness in your systems, a malicious person will find it and steal from you.
More often than not, that vulnerable spot is your digital front porch, your email system.
Email seems to be the attack method of choice as these statistics bear out:
- 94% of people couldn’t tell the difference between a real email and a pfishing email 100% of the time.
- 62% of respondents in a global pfishing study said they trusted an email that used a “spoofed” sender email address that appeared to have been sent by UPS.
- Nearly 1 in 5 (20%)n of users will click on a link within a pfishing email.
Pfishing? Spoofing? What’s going on in your email inboxes?
Because email is a much-used tool of most likely everyone in your company, you can’t rely solely on technology to protect you from outside threats when it comes to your email.
There are nine easy ways to protect yourself and your company from the most common email threats. We present that list here and will go into detail in subsequent posts:
- Be aware of email requests with high urgency or asking for quick action.
- Never give personal or financial information over email.
- Don’t click on Links from messages that contain misspellings.
- If an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is.
- Think about whether you initiated the action.
- Be careful about what you post publicly to social networking sites.
- Stay educated on tactics used by attackers.
- Don’t send or store passwords in email.
- Act quickly if you think you’ve been pfished.
This is an ongoing and pretty universal problem, meaning you are not alone. And keep in mind there are resources around to help you. We offer this downloadable article and our expertise. Please contact us if you would like to learn more.