Your best defense against phishing attacks
“How can I prevent someone from hacking my company?”
I am asked this question whenever I speak to business CEOs. My response? Ensure your workers never open their emails. Of course, that’s not possible. and the answer is to train them to be your frontline prevention against cybercriminals.
This would be the right place to begin because office workers typically respond to emails in under two minutes, enough time for any cybercriminal to penetrate your company’s customer database and destroy your reputation. Two minutes?
Why would anyone want to hack my business?
You might not know this, but hackers have been lurking in your system for months, even years. When you finally discover their presence, it may already be too late.
Or if you are one of the lucky ones, no direct evidence exists that anything has been stolen—not yet.
In both cases, that’s when you call an ethical hacker.
I show companies where the holes are and close them up before the hacker can do more damage. Typically, the first step is a vulnerability assessment, followed by a thorough penetration test.
These steps not only offer a quick overview of your security defences, but they also put me in the hacker’s chair. I became a hacker. Within minutes, I can find the point of entry, and how long a hacker has been lurking in your system—then there is a hush. No one can believe it.
Amazon, Apple continues to top list of impersonator scams
If Amazon or Apple has reached out to confirm a recent purchase, or offer a refund, or claim someone has hacked your account—you’re one click or phone call away from falling for a business impersonator scam. Other phony claims include an undelivered or lost package, or an unfulfilled order requiring more money.
Of course, since you’ve been following me, you know never to click or call a number. Still, since July 2020, about one in three people in the USA have reported a business
impersonator scam. According to the Federal Trade Commission’s Data Spotlight, with scammers pretending to be a customer representative from either Amazon or Apple.
In Canada, the Better Business Bureau, in February 2021, reported that in British Columbia an increase in calls from people pretending to be an Amazon employee caught their attention.
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