It’s Friday, and everyone on your team is ready to get the weekend started. At the end of the day, they get a message that seems to have come from your email address. It doesn’t really seem to have been written by you, and strangely enough, it requests their usernames and passwords be sent as a reply.
It isn’t your email address, and they’re not your words. They’ve come from a hacker that’s spoofed your email account, another effective cybercrime tactic used to breach your system and steal your sensitive business data.
While this is an imagined scenario, it raises a few pertinent questions about how your company approaches cybersecurity:
To be fair, most business owners would be hard-pressed to provide answers to these questions. While they may have a measure of how their employees would react to these kinds of threats, technology is best left to cybersecurity experts.
This doesn’t mean you should let your cybersecurity take the backseat. Cybercrime is growing more sophisticated by the day, and with thousands of breaches costing businesses billions of dollars, cybersecurity is no longer just a technology issue—it’s a business issue.
This blog will look at the differences between spoofing and hacking, how hackers use social media to gain access to your networks, and how a dedicated security partner like SBT Partners will help your business stay secure at all times, including closing time on Friday afternoons.
The goal of a phishing attack is to lure someone to either open a malicious file contained in an email or direct a user to a dangerous website. Phishing scams look like emails that were sent by legitimate businesses for common-sense reasons. They may ask to update a profile or verify personal information. The web addresses may look legitimate, and sometimes they accompany urgent messages to pay an outstanding bill or respond to a customer service issue. They are tricks, and while a savvy user can spot them a mile away, hackers use this tactic because it produces results.
Spoofing takes this tactic a dangerous step further. The weakness of a standard phishing attack is that it can be easy to spot an email from a seemingly random source. Spoofing is when someone disguises an email address, phone number, website URL, or fake social media account to convince a user that a message or file has come from a trusted source.
This message may appear as if it has come from a boss, a vendor, or a customer, but it hasn’t. Hackers can also generate fake social media accounts and conduct spoofing attacks from fake accounts that resemble trusted sources. They can steal photos and use personal information from any social network. Social engineering attacks like Facebook spoofing take time and are rare compared to other, less targeted phishing attacks, but the goal is the same—gain access to sensitive information.
Spoofing is a more targeted strategy than a normal phishing attack. While phishing is mostly automated, spoofing requires research and thought. So why you? The answer is, why not? Spoofing attacks are as common for small businesses as they are for large corporations. Any data can be held for ransom or used to steal someone’s identity, and cybercriminals see the small technology budgets and multi-tasking employees of small businesses as prime targets. So, how do you fight back? World-class cybersecurity.
Cybersecurity is only as strong as its weakest link, and social media spoofing requires a vigilant workforce and cutting-edge technology to monitor and prevent the attack in the first place.
This may all seem out of budget for small businesses, but at SBT Partners, it’s a component of a greater cybersecurity strategy.
At SBT, our goal is to modernize your workplace through effective cloud computing, efficient automated processes, and a strong cybersecurity policy that provides a layered defense against spoofing and phishing attempts. How do we do this?
SBT Partners provides a broad range of modern cybersecurity tools that keep your network safe from any external threat, including spoofing.
Whether it’s through a security and vulnerability test, employee training providing the tools needed to stop phishing attacks, Technology-as-a-Service that reduces costs, or maintaining your critical infrastructure, we can help you avoid conflicts and put your company in a better position than ever before to work undisturbed and out of harm’s way.
Modern technology has made it easier than ever for employees to instantly communicate and collaborate, but with that technology comes risks. SBT is here to mitigate those risks, thwart hackers and cybercriminals, and give businesses of any size the means to fight back. This is the SBT Partnership in action.
How well can you fight back? Reach out to SBT Partners for a consultation and talk to a cybersecurity expert to help you protect your business.
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