There are many ways to grow your business, but as your company evolves, there are also scammers and hackers that want to steal company data for their personal gain. I was in one of these situations myself a little while ago.
In fact, during a weekday I had some downtime and out of the blue I received a message from a regular vendor that told you they got over $50000, yet they aren’t really sure what you placed an order for. They are now asking for the account information. When you see this kind of stuff you automatically enter into overdrive.

The heart is pounding very fast, you’re worried that any deadlines will not be met. You click on their attachment, perform an invoice scan, then you confirm your account and bank info, send the payment email and wait for the results. After a little bit you receive a message that it’s all good and then you’re able to leave all of this behind.
Yet after a little while, you receive a strange call saying that the order never arrived. Another panic ensues, and this time you go to the email to see what happened. After you check the previous invoice, you realize that the company name was spelled differently. As a result, you see that it’s not the vendor that talked with you, instead you were dealing with a scammer. And by sending your personal information including bank accounts, you offered that scammer all the information that he needed to steal money from you.

The worst thing that can happen is to do something like this, as hackers will basically have access to all your company’s funds and personal information. According to Kaspersky Lab Security Experts, a lot of scammers are using new domains and they try to attack company employees to share sensitive data. Since many employees are very busy, they will rarely double-check a domain. And if the domain is similar, then they will think that email is from the company they are working it.

Is there something that you can do?

  • The most important thing that you can do is to double-check the origin of the message and see who is sending it.
  • On top of that, you want to make sure that you trust the source. If you don’t know the person, try to avoid clicking on any message they are sending, just to be safe.
  • It’s crucial to avoid all those situations when you are contacted randomly. Make sure that you use anti-malware, check the sender email and back up all your data.
  • More importantly, avoid sharing sensitive information with anyone via email. Talk with them on the phone first and ensure that you are sending all the info afterwards.
  • In case the computer or network was compromised, shut everything down and work closely with professionals to avoid any issues.

It’s crucial for your business to educate employees when it comes to reading emails. You never know where cyber security threats can come from. Proper cyber education for your employees can really make quite the difference. It’s an important investment for your business and it can pay off big time!