Are you protecting your business from digital scams?
Posted on February 5th, 2018 by Matthew Kiernan
Email is now a vital function of many businesses and their finance. Emails, like post boxes in the past, are seeing increased amounts of vital and confidential communications pass through them, such as invoices, statements, bills and contracts.
Increased use of email over the last decade has seen scammers switch from the less and less common telephone calls to the increasingly common email phishing, identity theft, viruses and hackers. We are seeing email scams more and more due to email being unaffected by the location of the scammers or the target.
Scammers frequently pose as Government departments and large organisations such as ASIC and Telstra. Using fake email addresses they target a large number of email addresses with the same bogus email. This is called email phishing and usually invites you to update your personal and credit card details.
However scammers not limited to only sending emails and hoping that you act on them. There have been increasing cases of clients’ email logins becoming compromised. The scammer will then pose as the email address holder and email invoices to your customers requesting payment or apologising for the previously provided incorrect bank details. The best way to avoid your email (or other accounts) being hacked is to enable 2 factor authentication. This means that any hacker would need to accept a notification on your mobile phone as well as have your password in order to gain access.
The last piece in the email security puzzle is computer viruses, many of which are transferred via email attachments. We recommend that clients remain vigilant when opening attachments and if unsure of what the attachment is, then leave it closed.
Security of financial information should be a top priority for all businesses and security of email accounts forms a large part of that.
For more information visit https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/
