With the growing amount of competition in the digital business market, the business exercises have only got a lot tougher. Anyone with some technical knowledge or a decent budget can start his own website and before you know you have added a new competitor in the online arena.
Besides, with all the wonderful benefits offered by your website you are also prone to a number of issues like data scraping, data mining etc. And the last thing you would like is to grapple with the malicious attempts of “digital vultures” – hackers, spammers, phishers, etc.! But they do creep into the scene, somehow- just like vultures gather when the lion is about to enjoy its meal! When there is no escape, bravery is not an option but the condition of survival.
So, here are a few things to keep in your mind that will help you to remain largely unscathed with such attempt:
Be careful while publishing your mail
Avoid publishing your emails as it is you@youcompany.com The data scraping tools are great allies of spammers too and they can neatly whisk away the mails addresses and give it to the spammers allow them to fill your mailbox with spam emails.
Don’t unsubscribe from suspicious emails
While many recipients will grow suspicious of any link given in the body of such emails, some of them will not think twice before clicking on unsubscribe link. Such links (including) unsubscribe) could lead to malware or spyware silently sabotaging your key files or corrupting them to disrupt the entire system.
Multifaceted shield
One of the major dilemmas of many website owners is that how their website could be compromised even when it was protected by anti-malware and antivirus. The answer is that while working with your web hosting account you actually work in a multidimensional environment. You might have an excellent security for your server but what about your FTP account or other associated accounts! So it is important to ensure that you are using best security guidelines for each of your accounts!
Innovative ways of phishing
Despicable they are for sure but we just cannot ignore the improvement the phishing exercises have made in the last few years. Earlier there were only a few limited phishing exercises to extract your personal details. Lottery winning notifications and account transfers requiring your personal data were the most common ways of phishing.
In the present scenario, ether is a number of phishing attempts that cent-percent mimic the authentic sources- right from visual structure to languages, words, and even the technical jargons or clauses. Verification and alert emails are among the preferable ways of phishing.
Some determined phishes would even go to the length of threatening you to take a legal action if the filled up form is not submitted in time. The main objective is to affect one’s common sense by inducing instant fear.
Trust is not a cheap commodity
Some people will even go to the length of offering you to use their credit cards and in exchange transfer the equivalent amount of cash to the account of someone to whom they want to pay. The reason is that “Mr. someone” cannot accept the credit card payment and your recipient has neither ebony hard cash nor the required amount in their bank account. The one word that you will shout when you will see their emails will be “Liar, Liar Liar”
Technically that becomes 3 words, a minor correction here! If such emails might sound funny to you, funnier still will be the fact that some gullible people possibly believe such emails and transfer theory accounts before the worst happens! The credit cards get bounced when they attempt to use it! Yeah, some people are really so gullible!
Corporate conglomerates at radar
The MNCs and international enterprises are the most preferred targets of cybercriminals and 2/3rds of them suffer at their hands. However, only 1/3rd of them employ regular security training sessions for their employees. Quality of most of such training sessions, despite the professional format, is another thing to debate on. The size of business determines its operations, transactions, and processes.
No wonder then that the cyber tacks on such huge enterprises and corporate conglomerates can have disastrous effect as such attacks can bring all the organizational processes and transactions to a standstill.
So, if you have not yet started imparting IT security training to your employees it is the high time you should think about starting IT security training sessions.