Phishing emails are targeted attempts at stealing your private information in order to leak it, use it in a dangerous manner or seek financial gain. A scammer conducts this attack by luring unsuspecting online users to click a seemingly safe link. In reality, this link is often used to download a virus onto your computer and hack into your private information. As you can imagine, this situation is best avoided – especially from within organisations where privacy and confidentiality are of utmost importance.
How do we ‘avoid’ phishing emails?
While preventing the reception of phishing emails remains a difficult task, learning to identify, ignore and report these instances can be crucial to your organisation’s unhindered success. Hence, the proper education of your staff in the avoidance of this scam is, unequivocally, essential.
What could happen if your staff aren’t trained to spot and avoid phishing emails?
Well, to be frank: an external scammer with an agenda unknown to you – one that is almost definitely detrimental to your business – is given free access to all of your organisation’s confidential data. This includes names, addresses, contact details, financial information, healthcare information and whatever else you may keep tabs on – of yourself, your employees and also your clients.
We shouldn’t need to reiterate, then, that we cannot understate the importance of appropriate education on phishing emails being included in your cyber security policy.
Though this all sounds a bit bleak, it’s not all bad. The good news is: prevention is easy!
Once you decide to educate your staff, the risk of being a victim to a serious phishing email attack is minimalised, so you can conduct your business and thrive as you would like to, without the added worry of a career-ending breach.
Read part 1 and part 3 of our series on phishing to find out more or register for our FREE IT Connectivity Business Review.
