Social Engineering is Big Business

Phishing attacks are continuing to rise in the UK. According to GOV.UK, almost 40% of British businesses and 26% of charities have faced cyber attacks in the last year, with the majority of those attacks targeting SMB’s – 65% in fact.

In short, the chances of your business facing a cyber attack are pretty high, and with a 600% increase in phishing attempts in the last year, the risk continues to rise. This is because the success rate for phishing attacks is so high and it is easy for cyber criminals to cast a wide net.

How do phishing attacks work?

The concept of phishing attacks is a simple one. Cybercriminals use the approach to trick honest company employees into thinking an email is from a manager or executive. If they’re ‘hooked’, they open the email and the cybercriminal has access to all their data and potentially the company’s overall network.

Potential consequences of ignoring the phishing threat

Doing nothing may seem like an option. With IT budgets and resources stretched to the limit, something always has to give. But with the upwardly spiralling trends for phishing attacks, it’s a mistake to think it only happens to someone else.

The potential consequences of ignoring, and then being a victim of, a phishing attack can be severe. From the threat of negative media headlines and a damaged reputation through to potential legal action and heavy regulatory fines, the list makes for uncomfortable reading. Your company’s reputation with its own customers could take a hammer blow if a phishing attack exposed credit card information or other sensitive personal details.

Not only that, social engineering is big business and so it seems, getting easier to deploy. If an organisation is breached and customer and/or employee data is stolen, it is not simply a case of recovering from the attack and moving on.

A breach could prove problematic for an organisation’s customers, staff and suppliers for a long time. This is especially important since without the right protections in place, many cyberattacks are invisible to the victims, meaning people would have no idea their details had fallen into the wrong hands until it’s too late.

Corporate Responsibility

Apart from the obvious financial implications, it’s good corporate social responsibility to recognise this risk and take the appropriate steps to protect the individuals with associations to your organisation. And, when there are good solutions out there to prevent the worry and allow IT to focus on enabling the business, why take the risk?

Which brings us to….

How to prevent your organisation being caught on a line

Phishing attacks use email as their route into organisations and users’ email accounts are the ‘live bait’ phishing attackers thrive on. Protecting your users’ mailboxes from potential phishing attacks is the same as protecting fish stocks in a lake. With no bait in the water, there is no risk that the fish will bite.

The point here is not to compare your company’s highly capable users with fish in a lake. It’s to illustrate that, to stop phishing attacks, the easiest way is to cut the attackers off from the most vulnerable point of your organisation’s network – inboxes.

Don’t think all email security is created equal

Email security isn’t a new concept, so you might wonder why so many organisations are ‘hooked’. But not all email security products are the same and many just can’t protect against what has become a very sophisticated adversary. And it’s not all about the cost, with comprehensive systems available from email security specialists offering all the protection you need without breaking the bank.

Without this access point into an organisation’s data, there is simply no way for hackers to execute phishing attacks.