Phishing is currently the biggest IT related threat against companies and brands around the world.
Luckily there are steps your company and your employees can take to minimize that threat. In this post we have gathered 8 steps your company can follow to hopefully eliminate the threat.
Phishing is not a new thing, but it still happens. All the time. Now you also have to be aware of people trying to phish your information from SoMe accounts. Scammers use email, text or SoMe accounts to trick you into giving them your personal information. They may want to try to steal your bank account number, other account numbers or your password and if they succeed they could gain access to your email, bank or other accounts. Unfortunately scammers launch thousands of phishing attacks like these every day and they are often successful, even with all the awareness which is has been created over the past years.
We all need to be aware of this risk when we go online whether you are a brand owner or acting as yourself, but as a brand owner you can help your customers. Your company can monitor the Internet for copyright infringement of your brand by other firms or even lookalike brands that have copied your branding. There are different online tools to help with this monitoring.
Since the holiday season is on its way and Black Friday is coming up, we thought it was a good time to remind both companies and private people to be more aware of phishing again. Last holiday season there were examples of companies launching holiday competitions on SoMe where you could win a nice presents and so a lot followers participated. Afterwards some of the followers received a message on Instagram saying they were the winners, and in order to receive the gift they just had to follow a few steps (where one of the steps was handing out their credit card information). What they didn’t notice was that the account they received the message from was not the original brand, but an account with a very similar brand name. Needless to say, this was a very unpleasant experience both for the customers who were scammed and for the company who was exploited.
How to protect yourself or your company from phishing
1) Make sure to streamline your domain strategy and SoMe strategy
2) Make an internal domain & SoMe policy
3) Register the most important typos
4) Use multi-factor authentication to your domain account
5) Be cautious when opening attachments
6) Think before you click! Do not open links in emails unless you know the sender or at least know why you are receiving the links
7) Never give out personal information
8) Keep your browser up to date
At Dotwhat we have been helping clients for over 20 years with building and maintaining a future-proof domain strategy and we are also ready to assist you with getting your company streamlined and help you get a domain strategy to protect your business and make sure that your domains are managed in a secure way.
Send us an email mk@dotwhat.com or call us at +45 22 26 19 41