The Truth About Cyber-Crime

If you own a phone, you’ve likely gotten a call with a robotic voice notifying you about something such as the IRS wanting your money or that your personal information has been stolen. If you have an email address, you have probably gotten more than a handful of spam email on any given day. While these are common occurrences, at what point are these scammers a real danger to you and your company? Let’s start with the facts.

Numbers

• 76% of websites contain vulnerabilities
• 496,657 web attacks blocked per day
• 1 in 965 emails is a phishing attack
• 317M new malware variants yearly
• 28% of malware is virtual-machine aware
• 9M malicious web robots

Hackers tend to target the small and medium businesses because they have fewer resources, minimal security expertise, and inferior (or freeware) anti-viruses. Additionally, these companies tend to have less advanced security layers, are prone to bank online, and are less stringent on security policies.

It is important to familiarize yourself with some common suspicious qualities in emails. Here are some tips for noticing these red flags:

• Don’t just look at the senders name, but also look at the email address it came from
• If prompted to download files, hover your mouse over the link (do not click it) and look at the bottom left-hand corner of your window. Here, you will see the exact site that the link would direct you to. If it is a scam, there will likely be random content in the URL and the hacker link will be obvious

As cybercrime becomes more and more of an ongoing issue, the most important thing is to raise awareness within your office. With this information and these helpful tips, you will be better equipped to protect your employees and your company as a whole.