Many companies today rely on internet connectivity for their day to day tasks. This means that almost every company is, in some way, connected to the internet – which in turn means that they can be vulnerable to cyber attacks. It’s not just headline-grabbing issues like the recent Heartbleed exploit and Internet Explorer issues, however; small and large companies alike face regular attacks every day.

One of the most common forms of cyber-attack is the phishing scam. This generally takes the form of an email, disguised to appear as if it is from a trustworthy source, which attempts to trick the user into handing over sensitive information such as usernames and passwords. Such attacks often masquerade as communications from banks, retail sites and even IT administrators.

Phishing scams can vary in their sophistication; some are easy to spot because the tone and grammar of the email simply don’t match up to the standards of normal company communications. Others, however, are sophisticated enough to be quite difficult to spot. Use of a common trick can often identify them – links in these emails are often disguised, so that while they display something like “www.trustedwebsite.com” they in fact direct the user to “www.trustedwebsite.fakesite.com” – where the “trustedwebsite” is simply a sub-section of the phisher’s site designed to look like the real, trustworthy site.

It is tempting to think that these email attacks are not important – ignore them and they are harmless. However, it only takes one employee to make a mistake and your sensitive company data could be put into the wrong hands. This is why it is important to have a set response for IT incidents of any scale. Any IT incident which could threaten your data security needs to be identified and reported, even if it had no real impact, so that you can put measures in place to prevent any future such incidents

To combat phishing attacks and other spam emails, it is important to train your staff firstly to recognise them and secondly to report them. When such emails are identified, it is easier to block and filter them so that they never reach your employee’s inbox in the first place. As part of our IT support services in London, we offer email hosting, and you can choose to have spam filtering included as part of this service. This will help you to avoid many of these day-to-day attacks. In addition, we can keep your anti-virus software up to date, to help ensure that your network doesn’t get infected by malicious emails or websites, and we can perform a full security review if necessary, to give you the peace of mind that you need. For more information on how we can help, contact us today.