How to Minimize the Risk of a Social Media Data Breach

Social Media Data Breaches: Reducing the Risk
What Is IT Compliance? Here’s What You Need To Know

How to Minimize the Risk of Social Media Data Breaches

While data breaches can happen at any time and anywhere, the world of social media has become a prominent battleground in recent years.

Virtually every organization – businesses, educational institutions, and associations – has employees, students, and members who make use of social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram in their personal lives.

More often than not, businesses themselves have a considerable online presence and draw on social media networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, in particular, for marketing functions, sales, and client relations.

Organizations that lack a significant online presence but have employees that use social networks have an obligation to ensure that their users and staff members’ identities are safeguarded online.

Many organizations supply their employees with basic information on safe internet practices, with the hope that they will implement these practices at home as well as at work. This offers an ideal opportunity for corporate security teams to lay the groundwork for what actions can be taken in case of a large-scale social network cyberattack.

The goal is to lessen the impact of data breaches that are otherwise out of your control or to limit their adverse effects.

In this article, we’ll explore five ways to help minimize the risk of data breaches on social media networks and other applications.

Social Media Data Breaches: Reducing the Risk

Don’t Reuse Passwords – But Do Change Them Often

We’re going to presume that you and your team are already aware of how to come up with a strong password, using a succession of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols – and not including telltale tidbits like the name of your pet.

Great password? Check! But wait, there’s more!

Whenever a major social media breach does occur, it may take some time between when the breach first surfaces, when an organization detects it, and when you’re alerted to the fact that your information has been compromised.

If you’re changing your password consistently, you narrow the window of damage opportunity between those monumental events. Even if you’ve fashioned what you believe to be the perfect password, don’t recycle it across multiple accounts. 

Based on surveys conducted by Terranova Security, nearly 80% of users are still utilizing the same passwords on numerous systems. That number increases even more for the younger generation – either they aren’t aware of the risk or it’s possible that they don’t want to have to recall a slew of different passwords.

Regardless, if you’re using the same account-password combination on several channels and one channel is breached, cyberattackers are more likely to be able to infiltrate your other accounts.

Social Media Data Breaches: Reducing the Risk

Consider Utilizing a Password Management Tool to Preserve Your Passwords

If you don’t want to – or can’t – remember all of those complicated passwords you’ve created, consider making use of a secure password management tool.

From a functionality standpoint, a password manager is simply that – a program you log in to with one password that stores all of your other passwords. Think of it, more or less, as a digital wallet.

When considering which password management tool to use, try to find one that’s well-encrypted and allows for management between a number of platforms and devices.

A few of the more prominent password management tools on the market include 1Password, KeePass, and Dashlane.

Social Media Data Breaches: Reducing the Risk / How to Keep Your Passwords Secure

Implement Two-Factor Authentication

Suppose someone does come into possession of your password – what then? In all likelihood, they’ll appropriate your username in order to gain access to your social network accounts – at the very least – unless you’ve initiated two-factor authentication.

Two-factor authentication is a security method that provides a computer user access only after they have supplied multiple forms of evidence verifying that they are legitimately the user they claim to be. 

Let’s say you’re connecting from a computer or location that you haven’t used before – if you have two-factor authentication set up, the application will send a PIN to your phone which you must then reproduce. If someone has pilfered your password and is trying to connect to one of your accounts, you’ll receive a notification of an unauthorized access attempt.

If it obviously isn’t you who’s attempting to log in from a new source or location, you’ll know that a hacker has moved past the first stage – that is, accessing your password. If that is the case, deny access, change your password right away, and be grateful you set up two-factor authentication.

Through the use of social engineering or malware, cybercriminals will masquerade as an individual involved in these money transfers to trick the victim into sending money to a bank account owned by the cybercriminal.

Once the fraud is exposed, it’s often too late to recoup the money. Scammers are quick to relocate the money to other accounts and withdraw the cash or use it to buy cryptocurrencies.

However, the scam is not always associated with an unauthorized transfer of funds. One BEC variation involves compromising legitimate business email accounts and requesting personally identifiable information (PII), wage and tax settlement (W-2) forms, or even cryptocurrency wallets from recipients.

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

Steer Clear of Online Applications That Enable You to Log In Automatically Using Your Facebook Credentials

More and more apps are connecting back and forth and enabling users to access multiple channels with a single sign-on (SSO).

You’ve likely encountered apps where you can create an account or sign in automatically simply by using your Facebook credentials. Convenient? Smart? Not exactly.

While it might seem like a timesaving method, should your Facebook credentials become exposed, hackers could take advantage of them to access other accounts under your name. Whenever possible, refrain from taking advantage of these opportunities.

The supposed convenience of social media-based SSO is appealing, but bear in mind that if you are compromised on one platform, you could be compromised on another. The more interconnected systems you have, the more you are at risk.

Cryptocurrency 101

Take Heed When Your Friends’ Social Network Accounts Are Compromised

“Don’t accept any new friend requests from me. My account has been hacked.”

“Don’t click on the link in the message it looks like I sent you on Facebook. It isn’t me.”

You see these kinds of posts in your newsfeed all the time. But those are just the ones we’re aware of for certain. You might have friends or online acquaintances who don’t yet realize they’ve been compromised, and hackers may already be using their accounts to make phishing attempts.

Other times, hackers are merely paying attention to and gathering information that people post voluntarily on social media.

What’s the solution? It’s simple.

Don’t post confidential information on social media! Don’t make mention of your dog’s name on social media then use “What is your pet’s name?” as the security question on your online banking account.

And if your account is breached, let your friends know…immediately! Particularly on social media.

It’s all about creating a culture of information security. By presenting this information to users, organizations can demonstrate that they’re not just preoccupied with their own pursuits, but they’re concerned about the well-being of their employees as well.

 

Final Thoughts

DataGroup Technologies, Inc. (DTI) offers a wide variety of cybersecurity services to help protect your business from cyberthreats, including security risk assessments, web and DNS filtering, next-generation firewalls, network security monitoring, operating systems and application security patches, antivirus software, and security awareness training. Give us a call today at 252.329.1382 to learn more about how we can help you #SimplifyIT!

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How To Identify & Protect Against DDoS Attacks

Shadow IT: How Your Company’s Data Is Silently Being Leaked Online
Shadow IT: How Your Company’s Data Is Silently Being Leaked Online

How to Identify & Protect Against DDoS Attacks

A DDoS attack may be one of the least sophisticated forms of cyberattacks, but it has the potential to be one of the most disruptive and most powerful – and it can be incredibly challenging to prevent and mitigate.

If you’ve ever heard about a website being “brought down by hackers,” it typically means that the site has fallen victim to a DDoS attack. Essentially, hackers have attempted to cause the website to crash by saturating it with an excessive amount of traffic.

To find out how to identify and protect your business against DDoS attacks, read on…

WHAT IS A DDoS ATTACK?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious assault launched from large clusters of compromised computer systems and internet-connected devices, including computers, cell phones, routers, and IoT devices. This network of devices, collectively referred to as a botnet, is used to flood the targeted website or its surrounding infrastructure with huge volumes of internet traffic – including incoming messages, connection requests, and fake packets. 

The ultimate aim of a DDoS attack is to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, network, website, device, or application in order to prevent legitimate users from accessing it. 

A successful DDoS attack can take the service offline for a significant period of time, ranging from seconds to weeks at a time. The impact of such an attack can be extremely destructive to any online organization, leading to loss of revenue, erosion of consumer trust, and long-term reputation damage. Considering the sheer volume of devices involved, these multi-person, multi-device barrages are usually harder to fend off.

DDoS attacks are favorite weapons of choice for hacktivists, cyber vandals, extortionists, and anyone else seeking to make a statement or support a cause. Attackers’ motivations might be to cause mischief, exact revenge, or may even serve as a smokescreen for other nefarious activities, including breaching the target’s security perimeter.

3 COMMON TYPES OF DDoS ATTACKS

DDoS attacks can be divided into three primary categories:

Application-layer (or layer 7) attacks overload an application or server with a large number of requests requiring resource-intensive handling and processing. If the target receives millions of these requests in a short period of time, it can very quickly get overwhelmed and either slow to a crawl or freeze up completely. Size is measured in requests per second (RPS). Examples include: HTTP floods, slow attacks, and DNS query flood attacks. 

Network-layer (or layer 3-4) attacks send large numbers of packets to the targeted network’s infrastructures and management tools. Size is measured in packets per second (PPS). Examples include: UDP floods, SYN floods, NTP amplification, DNS amplification, and Smurf attacks.

Volume-based attacks use massive amounts of bogus traffic to overwhelm a resource such as a website or server. Size is measured in bits per second (BPS). Examples include: ICMP, UDP, and spoofed-packet flood attacks.

HOW DOES A DDoS ATTACK WORK?

Cybercriminals commandeer internet-connected machines by carrying out malware attacks; or, alternately, they gain access by utilizing the default username and password the product is issued with – assuming the device is password-protected at all. Once attackers have infiltrated the device, it becomes part of a botnet that they control. Botnets can vary in size from a reasonably small number of compromised devices – known as “zombies” – to millions of them.

These machines could be located anywhere in the world – thus the term “distributed” – and it’s doubtful the owners of the devices even realize what they’re being used for, as it’s likely the devices have been appropriated by hackers. The botnet can then be used to inundate a website or server with a superabundance of “fake” internet traffic.

Servers, networks, and other online services are equipped to handle a certain amount of traffic. But if they’re swamped with a horde of traffic such as occurs in a DDoS attack, systems can become overloaded. The high volume of traffic being transmitted by the DDoS attack clogs up or otherwise interferes with the system’s capabilities, while also prohibiting authorized users from accessing online services (which is where the “denial of service” element comes in).

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE UNDER A DDoS ATTACK

Any organization with a web-facing element needs to consider the amount of web traffic it typically receives and prepare for it accordingly. Large volumes of legitimate traffic can engulf servers, leading to slow service or no service – which could conceivably scare off potential customers. But organizations also have to be able to distinguish between genuine web traffic and a DDoS attack.

Consequently, capacity planning is a vital element of operating any website, with careful consideration given to determining what is an anticipated, typical amount of traffic and what extraordinarily high or unforeseen volumes of authentic traffic might look like. This forethought helps avoid causing interruption of service to users, whether by crashing the site because of high demands or erroneously blocking access due to a DDoS false alarm.

So, how can organizations tell the difference between a bona fide spike in demand and a DDoS attack?

Customarily, an outage brought on by legitimate traffic will only last for a brief period of time. Often the reason for the outage is apparent, such as an online retailer experiencing high demand for a new product, or a new video game’s online servers being flooded with traffic from enthusiastic gamers.

In the case of a DDoS attack, however, there are some unmistakable signs that a malicious and targeted campaign is underway. Oftentimes, DDoS attacks are engineered to cause disruption over a prolonged period of time, which could mean rapid increases in traffic at intervals of time causing frequent outages.

 

Another prime indicator that your organization has, in all likelihood, been hit with a DDoS attack is that online services abruptly slow down or go offline entirely for several days in a row, which could suggest that the services are being targeted by cybercriminals who simply want to wreak as much havoc as possible.

Some of these attackers might be executing an attack merely to cause chaos, while others may have been compensated to target a certain site or service. Still others might be attempting to run some type of extortion racket, vowing to call off the attack in return for a ransom.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE UNDER A DDoS ATTACK

Once it’s become obvious that your organization has been targeted by a DDoS attack, you should construct a timeline of when the issues began and identify how long they’ve persisted, as well as determining which assets like applications, services, and services are affected – and how that is adversely affecting users, customers, and the business in general.

It’s also crucial to notify your web-hosting provider as soon as possible. It’s probable that they will have already recognized the DDoS attack, but contacting them directly may help lessen the impact of a DDoS campaign. If it’s possible for your provider to switch your IP address, this will help prevent the DDoS from having the impact it did previously due to the fact that the attack will be pointing in the wrong direction. Security providers that offer DDoS mitigation services can also help minimize the impact of an attack.

Finally, if you have determined that your site is under attack, notify users about what’s going on as quickly as you can. Consider putting up a temporary site explaining the problem and providing users with steps they can follow in order to continue to use the service. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can also be used to promote this message.

HOW TO PROTECT AGAINST DDoS ATTACKS

Let’s be clear: it’s impossible to completely prevent a DDoS attack. Cybercriminals will continue to attack, and some are going to hit their targets, regardless of the defenses in place. However, there are a few preventative measures your company can take to protect against these types of attacks:

Monitor Your Web Traffic

As previously mentioned, having a clear grasp on what a “regular” level of web traffic looks like, as well as what would be considered abnormal, is critical in helping defend against DDoS attacks or spotting them early.

Keep an eye out for unexplained upsurges in traffic and visits from questionable IP addresses and geolocations, as these could be signs of cyberattackers executing “dry runs” to test your defenses prior to committing to a full-blown attack.

Some security experts suggest setting up alerts that will inform you if the number of requests for access exceeds a certain threshold. While this might not conclusively point to malicious activity, it does at least provide an advance warning that something sinister might be in the works.

Configure Your Firewalls and Routers

Firewalls and routers can play a prominent role in minimizing the damage of a DDoS attack. If configured properly, they can divert fake traffic by identifying it as potentially perilous and intercepting it before it ever arrives.

For optimum results, keep your firewalls and routers up-to-date with the latest security patches, as these systems remain your first line of defense against cyberthreats.

Plan Ahead And Be Ready to Respond

Initiate a rapid response plan, establishing procedures for your customer support and communication teams, not only for your IT professionals. Appoint a group of people within the organization whose duty it is to lessen the impact of a potential attack.

Enlisting the services of a third party to conduct DDoS testing – known as “pen testing” – can help detect your organization’s vulnerabilities, a crucial element of any protection protocol. DDoS testing simulates an attack against your IT infrastructure to see how it responds, enabling you to be even better prepared when the moment of truth arrives.

Consider Using Artificial Intelligence

While advanced firewalls and intrusion detection systems are most commonly used to stave off DDoS attacks, artificial intelligence (AI) is also being used to develop new systems.

These systems are designed to rapidly redirect internet traffic to the cloud for further analysis. Any traffic that’s determined to be malicious in nature can then be blocked before it ever reaches a company’s computers.

Not only might such programs be capable of recognizing and protecting against known DDoS indicative patterns, the self-learning capabilities of AI could also help anticipate and pinpoint DDoS patterns as well.

In addition, researchers are exploring the idea of using blockchain – the technology behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies – to allow people to share their untapped bandwidth in order to absorb the malicious traffic generated in a DDoS attack and render it useless.

Enable Comprehensive Security

Botnets are often built on devices with little to no integrated security features. Many IoT devices – “smart” machines that connect to the internet for greater functionality and efficiency – come with default usernames and passwords which many consumers neglect to immediately change after purchasing the devices.

Secure, unique passwords should be established for all devices connected to the internet, both within and outside the business environment – particularly if the organization encourages employees to use their own devices to perform their duties from time to time.

To further protect all your devices from malware – which, as we have seen, can directly aid in executing DDoS attacks – it’s important to make sure that comprehensive security solutions are being deployed. Make an effort to do some research and commit to cybersecurity solutions for your business that you can trust.

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

Final Thoughts

Despite the various measures an organization can take to help prevent a DDoS attack, some attempts will still be successful anyway. The fact of the matter is, if cyberattackers truly wish to take down an online service and have enough resources in place, they’ll do everything they can to succeed in their efforts.

However, if businesses are well-acquainted with the warning signs, it is possible to be prepared in the event that a DDoS attack does occur.

Cybersecurity has never been more important. We live in an increasingly connected world which enables cyberattackers to constantly find new ways to carry out digital attacks. Even the most vigilant business owners and IT managers become overwhelmed with the stress of maintaining network security and protecting their data.

DataGroup Technologies, Inc. (DTI) offers a wide variety of cybersecurity services to help protect your business from cyberthreats, including next-generation firewalls, email security solutions, web and DNS filtering, network security monitoring, operating systems and application security patches, and antivirus software.

If your business could benefit from one or more of these state-of-the-art services, give us a call at 252.329.1382 today!

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8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity
8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

Computer Security Day: 8 Tips to Bolster Your Business’s Cybersecurity

In 1988, the Association for Computer Security established the first Computer Security Day to raise awareness about cybersecurity issues. Computer Security Day encourages people to take ownership of their online presence and identity. Taking the time to review computer security best practices can help individuals and organizations avoid compromised data and other unwanted scenarios.

In celebration of this day, here are 8 tips for bolstering your computer security:

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

1) Update Passwords on All Your Devices

Take the time to change the passwords on all your online accounts. This is something that should be done on a regular basis anyway, but if you’ve neglected to do so recently, today is as good a time as any.

Avoid using the same passwords across multiple accounts and devices. Reusing the same or similar passwords over a period of time can put you at greater risk of being hacked. Ideally, you should create a different password for each account that you use on your various devices.

It probably goes without saying, but it’s never a good idea to share your passwords with others, even people that you trust. You can’t know for sure that they will keep your credentials as secure as you would yourself.

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

2) Create and Use Strong Passwords

When it comes to password security, length matters. Passwords that are 6 characters or fewer are much easier to hack, particularly if they consist of only lowercase letters. To strengthen your password, create a complex, unique mixture of upper and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers that is at least 9 characters in length.

A password manager can help generate unique passwords for each of your online accounts. At the same time, this useful tool can save all your passwords in one convenient location, so you don’t have to remember them each time. You can also take advantage of Password Checkup, a Google Chrome extension that warns you when it detects you using compromised, duplicate, or weak passwords. As another option, consider using the tool How Secure Is My Password to test the strength and “hackability” of your passwords.

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

3) Keep Your Software and Hardware Up-to-Date

Make sure that all software – for your operating systems, browsers, programs, applications, etc. – is updated with the latest versions available. When you’re all set with that, it’s time to update your protection software, including spyware, antivirus, and antimalware software. Run a security scan not only on your computers, but on your smartphones and tablets as well. Mobile devices are as much at risk, if not more so, than your desktops or laptops.

It’s crucial to check on the status of your hardware as well. Outdated hardware may not support recent software security upgrades, and also responds slower to cyberattacks, in the event that one should occur. Better to be safe than sorry and upgrade your hardware while everything is smooth sailing.

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

4) Encrypt and Back Up Your Data

Keep your data secure and confidential – whether it’s being stored or in transit – by encrypting it. Encryption uses complex algorithms to scramble your data and make it unreadable, ensuring that only an authorized person can access the data.

Create a backup copy of all your sensitive data on a portable storage device – such as an external USB or hard drive – and store it in a safe place. Alternatively, you could upload your backed-up data to a cloud-based storage solution such as Google Drive. It’s important to keep your data backups up-to-date and test them periodically.

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

5) Implement Multi-Factor Authentication

Many online platforms now allow you to enable multi-factor authentication in order to keep your accounts more secure. Multi-factor authentication offers an additional layer of protection by helping to verify that it’s actually you who’s trying to access your account and not an unauthorized user.

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

6) Be on the Lookout for Social Engineering Attacks

Social engineering attacks are difficult to counteract, as they’re specifically designed to take advantage of natural human characteristics, such as curiosity, respect for authority, and people’s desire to help their friends. Anytime you receive a suspicious email, it should be treated as such. Take a moment to think about where the communication originates from; don’t just trust it blindly.

Often, social engineering depends on a sense of urgency. Attackers hope that targets won’t think too hard about what’s going on. Thinking twice before taking any action can prevent most social engineering attacks and expose them for what they are – frauds.

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

7) Don’t Leave Your Devices
Unattended

Despite what you may think, locking your office is not enough. If you use a laptop or desktop computer at work, you should always power it down at night. Additionally, whenever you leave your office for the day, you need to lock up your memory keys, hard drives, and anything else that has sensitive data on it.

8 Tips for Strengthening Your Cybersecurity

8) Educate Your Employees About Cybersecurity Awareness

Cybercriminals are specifically targeting your employees when they send out phishing emails in attempting to steal information. Through training and awareness, you can help your employees better recognize fraudulent emails when they encounter them. In so doing, you can significantly reduce the risk of your employees surrendering sensitive data to those who would deliberately misuse it.

Onboarding training and continuous updates help create a human firewall between your company’s information and security threats. Employees need to understand that cybersecurity is every bit as much their concern as it is the concern of your technology experts.

DataGroup Technologies offers a wide variety of cybersecurity solutions to help protect your business against cyberthreats like malware, phishing, ransomware, man-in-the-middle attacks, social engineering, and distributed denial-of-service attacks. Are your company’s data and that of its customers fully protected? How can you be sure? Partner with us and we can help safeguard your business against all these and more! Call us today at 252.329.1382 or drop us a line here.

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How to Secure Your Business Website in 2022

How To Secure Your Business Website In 2022
How To Secure Your Business Website In 2022

How To Secure Your Business Website In 2022

If you have a booming business website that’s raking in profits and helping you establish your brand, that’s great! However, you still need to make sure your site is protected from hackers and trolls who might want to tarnish your image. To ensure continued success and prevent bad actors from appropriating your intellectual property, follow these tips to help better secure your business website.

Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?

What Is Business Email Compromise?

According to TechRepublic, business email compromise (BEC) is “a sophisticated scam that targets companies and individuals who perform legitimate transfer-of-funds requests.”

Through the use of social engineering or malware, cybercriminals will masquerade as one of the individuals involved in these money transfers to trick the victim into sending money to a bank account owned by the cybercriminal. Once the fraud is exposed, it’s often too late to recoup the money. Scammers are quick to relocate the money to other accounts and withdraw the cash or use it to buy cryptocurrencies.

However, the scam is not always associated with an unauthorized transfer of funds. One BEC variation involves compromising legitimate business email accounts and requesting personally identifiable information (PII), wage and tax settlement (W-2) forms, or even cryptocurrency wallets from recipients.

Business Email Compromise Attacks – Managed IT Services vs. In-House IT Specialists

How to Protect Your Business Against BEC Attacks

In the public service announcement, the FBI offers several suggestions for businesses to adopt to better protect against business email compromise attacks.

  • Use secondary channels (such as phone calls) or multi-factor authentication to validate requests for any changes in account information.
  • Ensure that URLs in emails are associated with the businesses or individuals from which they claim to be originating.
  • Keep an eye out for hyperlinks that contain misspellings of the actual domain name.
  • Steer clear of providing login credentials or PII of any sort via email. Bear in mind that many emails requesting your personal information may appear to be legitimate.
  • Verify the email address used to send emails – especially when using a mobile or handheld device – by making sure the address appears to match that of the purported sender.
  • Enable settings on employees’ computers to allow full email extensions to be viewed.
  • Monitor your personal financial accounts routinely for irregularities, such as missing deposits.
Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?

What to Do If You or Your Company Should Fall Victim to a BEC Attack

According to TechRepublic, business email compromise (BEC) is “a sophisticated scam that targets companies and individuals who perform legitimate transfer-of-funds requests.”

Through the use of social engineering or malware, cybercriminals will masquerade as one of the individuals involved in these money transfers to trick the victim into sending money to a bank account owned by the cybercriminal. Once the fraud is exposed, it’s often too late to recoup the money. Scammers are quick to relocate the money to other accounts and withdraw the cash or use it to buy cryptocurrencies.

However, the scam is not always associated with an unauthorized transfer of funds. One BEC variation involves compromising legitimate business email accounts and requesting personally identifiable information (PII), wage and tax settlement (W-2) forms, or even cryptocurrency wallets from recipients.

Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?

What to Do If You or Your Company Should Fall Victim to a BEC Attack

Cybersecurity has never been more important. We live in an increasingly connected world, which enables cyberattackers to constantly find new ways to carry out digital attacks. Even the most vigilant business owners and IT managers can become overwhelmed with the stress of maintaining network security and protecting their data.

These increasingly advanced cyberattacks create unprecedented situations of data breach and money extortion. The tools that hackers use are getting smarter and stronger every day. If you’re not proactive about protecting your network, your business will become a target of cybersecurity attacks.

DataGroup Technologies, Inc. (DTI) offers a wide variety of cybersecurity services to help protect your business from cyberthreats, including security risk assessments, email security solutions, web/DNS filtering, next-generation firewalls, network security monitoring, operating systems/application security patches, antivirus software, and security awareness training. If you’re not 100% certain that your business is protected from cybercriminals, contact us today at 252.329.1382 or message us here to find out more about how we can help #SimplifyIT for your business!

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Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?

Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?
Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?

Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?

On May 4th, 2022, the FBI published a public service announcement updating its warnings about the continuing threat of business email compromise, also known as CEO fraud. It’s a problem that has reached staggering proportions. Between June 2016 and December 2021, the FBI quantified 241,206 domestic and international incidents of business email compromise. The exposed dollar loss – including both actual and attempted losses – was more than $43 billion!

Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?

What Is Business Email Compromise?

According to TechRepublic, business email compromise (BEC) is “a sophisticated scam that targets companies and individuals who perform legitimate transfer-of-funds requests.”

Through the use of social engineering or malware, cybercriminals will masquerade as one of the individuals involved in these money transfers to trick the victim into sending money to a bank account owned by the cybercriminal. Once the fraud is exposed, it’s often too late to recoup the money. Scammers are quick to relocate the money to other accounts and withdraw the cash or use it to buy cryptocurrencies.

However, the scam is not always associated with an unauthorized transfer of funds. One BEC variation involves compromising legitimate business email accounts and requesting personally identifiable information (PII), wage and tax settlement (W-2) forms, or even cryptocurrency wallets from recipients.

Business Email Compromise Attacks – Managed IT Services vs. In-House IT Specialists

How to Protect Your Business Against BEC Attacks

In the public service announcement, the FBI offers several suggestions for businesses to adopt to better protect against business email compromise attacks.

  • Use secondary channels (such as phone calls) or multi-factor authentication to validate requests for any changes in account information.
  • Ensure that URLs in emails are associated with the businesses or individuals from which they claim to be originating.
  • Keep an eye out for hyperlinks that contain misspellings of the actual domain name.
  • Steer clear of providing login credentials or PII of any sort via email. Bear in mind that many emails requesting your personal information may appear to be legitimate.
  • Verify the email address used to send emails – especially when using a mobile or handheld device – by making sure the address appears to match that of the purported sender.
  • Enable settings on employees’ computers to allow full email extensions to be viewed.
  • Monitor your personal financial accounts routinely for irregularities, such as missing deposits.
Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?

What to Do If You or Your Company Should Fall Victim to a BEC Attack

According to TechRepublic, business email compromise (BEC) is “a sophisticated scam that targets companies and individuals who perform legitimate transfer-of-funds requests.”

Through the use of social engineering or malware, cybercriminals will masquerade as one of the individuals involved in these money transfers to trick the victim into sending money to a bank account owned by the cybercriminal. Once the fraud is exposed, it’s often too late to recoup the money. Scammers are quick to relocate the money to other accounts and withdraw the cash or use it to buy cryptocurrencies.

However, the scam is not always associated with an unauthorized transfer of funds. One BEC variation involves compromising legitimate business email accounts and requesting personally identifiable information (PII), wage and tax settlement (W-2) forms, or even cryptocurrency wallets from recipients.

Are You Protected Against Business Email Compromise Attacks?

Final Thoughts

Cybersecurity has never been more important. We live in an increasingly connected world, which enables cyberattackers to constantly find new ways to carry out digital attacks. Even the most vigilant business owners and IT managers can become overwhelmed with the stress of maintaining network security and protecting their data.

These increasingly advanced cyberattacks create unprecedented situations of data breach and money extortion. The tools that hackers use are getting smarter and stronger every day. If you’re not proactive about protecting your network, your business will become a target of cybersecurity attacks.

DataGroup Technologies, Inc. (DTI) offers a wide variety of cybersecurity services to help protect your business from cyberthreats, including security risk assessments, email security solutions, web/DNS filtering, next-generation firewalls, network security monitoring, operating systems/application security patches, antivirus software, and security awareness training. If you’re not 100% certain that your business is protected from cybercriminals, contact us today at 252.329.1382 or message us to find out more about how we can help #SimplifyIT!

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