This month we have four new tips courtesy of the South West Cyber Resilience Centre (SWCRC) to help you and your business to stay safe online.
- Brand impersonation: it’s messages from tech companies that you need to be wary of. And delivery firms. Based on recent findings from Checkpoint and Proofpoint, scam emails in recent times have most frequently used the name of Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn, Google, DHL and Paypal.
- Make sure you check – by phone – when someone asks you to change their bank details. Verizon have found that over half of the attacks from compromised email accounts took this form. A simple but unexpected message from someone you trust, might just mean that they’ve been hacked.
- QR codes are just weblinks, in a digital format. And you don’t always trust links, do you? This month there’s been emails which ask you to authenticate accounts by scanning a code. The site it takes you to will request your credentials but won’t be genuine.
- Be careful if you’re looking for templates, contracts and agreements online. Cyber criminals know that they’ll be accessed by a business audience and will go to some lengths to get to the top of a search ranking and offer you free content. The files you download – especially if in a zip file – may contain more than word documents.
If you’d like to stay up to date with the latest risks and get some free support to combat them, then why not become a member of the SWCRC? It is free and not for profit, plus it is led by the police and they speak “normal-speak” not geek. It could just save your data or your reputation by preventing you from being caught out.
