The Business Owners Guide to Phishing 1

The Business Owners Guide to Phishing

The business owner’s COMPLETE GUIDE to phishing: everything you need to know to keep your team and data safe.

It’s likely you’ve heard of phishing and know it’s something you want to avoid.

But do you know what it really means and exactly how a phishing attack works?

In our experience, lots of people don’t know the specifics. And that’s OK. But the key to keeping your business protected from phish-ing attacks is to know exactly how they work and the red flags to look out for.

What exactly is phishing?

It’s called ‘phishing’ because cyber criminals bait unsuspecting victims into ‘biting’, much in the same way you’d lure a fish to a hook with a big juicy maggot. This virtual bait is usually in the form of an email. And when the victim gets hooked, their device and potentially their whole network can become infected with malware. Or the victim is enticed into giving away login credentials which can lead to data and even financial theft.

Phishing isn’t just inconvenient. You should see how much time, expense and stress has to be invested in fixing the damage. Understand this: You want to avoid a phishing attack. Oh, and phishing doesn’t always come in the form of an email either. But more on that later.

 

To help you understand just how prevalant phishing attacks have become, here are some scary stats…

  • Last year 83% of organisations reported experiencing phishing attacks – that’s up 28% from 2020
  • It’s expected there will be an additional 6 billion attacks this year
  • A third of phishing emails are opened
  • Around 90% of data breaches occur as a result of phishing
  • 1 in 99 emails is a phishing attack. 25% of these slip through the security filters in your inbox
  • 60% of successful phishing attacks result in lost data
  • 52% result in a compromise of login credentials
  • 47% of phishing attacks lead to ransomware, where your data is encrypted and held hostage until you pay a ransom fee

What exactly a phishing attack look like?

Read our COMPLETE GUIDE to phishing

If you want more information, or you need help protecting your business, get in touch.