Aside from the challenges of competition and the constant need to innovate, cyberattacks are another serious threat to businesses. Phishing, in particular, is a common concern, with even company CEOs and mailroom employees often falling for such scams.
What may happen if your business employees won’t take phishing seriously? What preventive measures can you implement, and what should you do if your business falls victim to phishing attacks despite your best efforts? Read our thorough guide to build a strong defense against phishing attacks.
What Is Phishing & Why Is It a Threat to Your Business?
Phishing is a long-standing scam that uses social engineering to persuade email recipients to take harmful actions. Some phishing emails ask recipients to download malicious attachments. Others persuade them to enter sensitive information or login credentials into forms on fake websites. The most effective spear phishing scams can even persuade employees to transfer large sums of money to the attackers’ accounts.
Such incidents can have far-reaching and serious consequences for your business. Carelessly disclosing login credentials can result in fraud, identity theft, and data breaches. Furthermore, a breach could reveal everything, and we mean everything, your company wants to keep secret. From confidential client data to intellectual property information or confidential financial records—all of this sensitive data could be at risk.
The financial fallout can go up to millions of dollars—an amount that many businesses can’t recover from. In cases where monetary losses are not a concern, such scams may cause your company to lose the trust of its customers or even result in legal action.
How to Spot Phishing Emails?
Tools like ChatGPT have made phishing more widespread, with incidents of fraud becoming much more visible. Nonetheless, these emails still follow a familiar pattern, allowing careful recipients to spot and avoid them.
The email’s tone will be your first clue. Phishing emails tend to convey a sense of urgency in the hope that the victim will act without thinking. They urge you to take quick action, like downloading an attachment or logging into a fake account on a lookalike site, claiming you might lose access otherwise.
Business associates, vendors, banks, and legitimate companies will address you by your official name. Cybercriminals who send such emails indiscriminately will use terms like “customer” or “sir/madam.”
The sender’s address will also look suspicious. Cybercriminals can’t copy the original email address exactly, but they can use a version that looks almost the same at first glance. For example, let’s say “[email protected]” is the official contact address for a vendor’s billing department. The attacker could create a similar address, like “[email protected]” or “[email protected]” to try and trick your business employees into clicking on their sent emails.
Typos are another clever hint to watch for. The attacker might include them to make the email appear rushed and, therefore, more legitimate. Additionally, intentionally misspelled words for “account”, “password”, or “click” can also help the hacker’s email bypass spam filters.
Preventing Phishing Attacks
Ideally, you wouldn’t want your business or employees to become the targets of phishing attacks. So, if you want to know how to stop getting spam emails, try setting up spam filters and using authentication protocols to reduce the number of phishing emails that get to your business’s email boxes.
While maintaining a digital presence is essential for successful businesses, management and employees should be mindful of what they post publicly about themselves and your business. That way, attackers will have less tangible information to create convincing emails targeting your company.
Since phishing attacks seek to exploit human trust, awareness training is crucial for mitigating ones that do get through. All your employees should know how to recognize a phishing email and take appropriate action. Knowledgeable employees will be more likely to forward suspicious emails to the IT team. Additionally, they contact the real email sender through different channels to ensure their authenticity.
Dealing with the Aftermath
A staggering 76% of companies have experienced phishing attacks in 2023. This makes it safe to conclude that not all phishing attacks are spotted in time.
Even with all the training and cautious interactions with phishing emails, some businesses will eventually fall for one. So, what to do if you opened a phishing email?
Preparing an incident response plan ahead of time will help to mitigate much of the damage. The plan should include steps for identifying, reporting, quarantining, and eliminating the threat. It should also include mitigation protocols such as immediately changing all affected passwords. This applies even if multi-factor authentication was used. Such measures help prevent attackers from gaining access to any critical systems used in your business.
Additionally, you should also have data backups to quickly restore your business if a compromise occurs. Analyze and document the incident to strengthen your defenses against future attacks. And most importantly, be transparent with stakeholders about the incident and how you’re handling it to maintain their trust.
Conclusion
Technologies and trends come and go, yet phishing continues to target careless businesses and individuals worldwide. Hopefully, the knowledge you’ve discovered here will keep your business from joining those who fell victim to such attacks.