Email security is your business’s new headache. We now send over 205 billion emails every single day, and that figure is predicted to rise to 246 billion by the end of 2019. Emails are a key part of the communication networks within business allowing you to easily contact clients, prospects and even co-workers within a professional environment.
Hackers and scammers have been utilising email fraud since the 1990s, with virtually every email user having encountered at least one fraudulent email. You might be thinking to yourself “it’s no big deal. I have anti-virus and anti-spam software, so I don’t need to worry, right”.
Wrong.
Cyber-crime is rarely out of the headlines now and new threats are popping up every day. In 2014, two thirds of all email traffic was spam, and that’s a big problem for small and medium sized businesses. The cyber crime landscape has changed so much over the past couple of years and is only set to continue, as scammers develop new methods of attack. Hackers/scammers are now changing their tactics from the obvious phishing scams containing badly written content and unsafe links that we all know to avoid, to better developed imposter emails containing targeted research into your business and personal data.
Scary thought, right?
Business Email Commerce (BEC) also known as CEO Fraud is a relatively new form of scam, providing fast results for hackers and creating maximum damage within your business. These emails are much harder to spot and end up costing millions in fraudulent transfers. They use social engineering tools to carefully select their next targets, impersonating key staff members or trusted partners to trick their victims into transferring funds online. If they’re successful, they’ve then got unrestricted access to a wealth of information that can lead to massive financial losses and embarrassment especially with the introduction of the new GDPR laws in May.
We don’t want you to become another statistic so we’ve written a brand new guide on email security. The guide will provide you with information about the new BEC scam and steps you should make to ensure that you and your business are as protected as possible.
What can we do to help?:
There are a couple of ways that Intalect can help. There are software applications and internet services that can be implemented which scan these types of emails and stop them before they get to you.
Also, we can set up various things in your domain name such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records which can be set to further restrict where your email traffic comes from and ensure it arrives from safe sources.
