- PSA: Please pick up the phone before trusting an email.
It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and it’s a good time for a heads-up because phishing scams, like ACH fraud & AiTM attacks, are becoming increasingly cunning & effective, and the many headlines of businesses falling victim (to the tune of million-dollar losses, often unrecoverable) because of emails that look legitimate are gut-wrenching. The brutal part? Most of these incidents could’ve been prevented with a phone call, so…
Before you click, pay, or share data, pick up the phone and verify legitimacy. A 10-second phone call could save your company from devastating losses (in dollars/downtime, data, and damage to your reputation).
Why this matters:
- With the help of AI, cybercriminals are crafting ultra-convincing and effective email scams.
- They often gain your trust by impersonating trusted vendors, banks, or even coworkers.
- It’s estimated that 1 in every 83 emails is a phishing attempt (so you almost certainly have plenty of them lurking in your inbox now).
What to do:
- If it seems off, unusual, unprompted, out of the blue, or otherwise suspicious, don’t click. Delete it or call your IT team to check.
- If it looks real but involves a significant request, call the purported sender directly! It’s also a good idea to make it a company policy that every significant transaction gets at least two sets of eyes on it.
- Train your team. Your people are your last line of defense. Equip, educate, and empower them so they know what to look for and what to do.
Even if you’ve got cutting-edge tools in your arsenal managed by a solid & dedicated ever-vigilant army of IT professionals, no system is 100% bullet-proof. Your staff are your biggest vulnerability (which is why education is so important).
We put it this way—just because you have the best vehicle, the best insurance, and your seatbelt on…doesn’t mean you should cruise around with your eyes closed.
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TL;DR: Phishing *sounds* like something that would never happen to you, but
you DO receive attempts regularly. Stay sharp. Call to verify. And reach out to
your trusted IT team with questions or to ask about security awareness training.