“More than 5,000 people were conned into sending planned payments to fraudsters’ bank accounts last year and losses in the UK totalled £126m, according to police figures compiled for Radio 4’s You & Yours.
The number of cases of the scam – also known as “mandate” or “invoice” fraud – is up 71% on the previous year.
Police said people need to be suspicious of any persistent emails that suggest a change of bank account details” – quoting from BBC News article published today.
This type of fraud is particularly common in the small business community.
Use a good email client - Outlook and Gmail will suffice, as they provide consistent security updates and have privacy features built-in. Better still – consider using a hosted exchange for your company e-mail account. Contact us and we shall advise you what this is and how it works. You can also have enhanced virus, spam filtering and even archiving of email for up to 10 years.
Your company’s Facebook page – ensure you only use a generic e-mail for potential customers to contact you, such as info@, contact@, sales@. Never use your personal business e-mail address! It will get spammed! This advice also holds true for any other social media pages your company has AND your Website!
Chose a really good password with a minimum of 8 letters, which contains all of these:
Upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters, such as $ % ^ *, etc. Keep your password secret and don't re-use the same one for every account. Some simple tips to make a password more complicated, but still memorable can be use of $ or 5 for an S, an ! for an i or even @ for an a. These are simple ways to keep your login harder to hack.
Beware of public Wi-Fi. NEVER try and access your email or sensitive accounts via public Wi-Fi, as it can be easy to steal your password via a Keylogger program or Remote Administration Tools (RATs). You could give away your password without even knowing it. Good and up to date Anti-Virus software, such as Trend Micro keeps your devices secure from a Keylogger. An out of date virus scanner is as much use as a chocolate teapot!
Do not click on suspicious, unwarranted links. Don't log into linked accounts via your email client and beware of malicious spam. Most modern browsers will intercept many of these threats before you even see them, some will inevitably slip through the cracks as hackers will fight back again against the security software providers.
If you have no choice and you have to use public Wi-Fi to access sensitive accounts it would be wise to set up a VPN to offer a degree of protection, or at least always ensure you are using an encrypted connection (look for https:// in the website address)
A VPN, is just a virtual version of a secure, physical network—a web of computers linked together to share files and other resources. VPNs connect to the outside world over the Internet, and they can serve to secure general Internet traffic. If you have a support contract with us, feel free to give us a call, so we can guide you through that process. If you wish to put a support contract into place please contact us.
Courtesy of Matt Kidder, a Licensed Private Investigator with a global risk mitigation leader –
One of the most common forms of identity theft is email hacking, since emails are frequently the gateway to a person’s life on the Web” Kidder explains. Kidder cites three main reasons why thieves may want to hack into your individual account:
“A hacker can email your contacts and others as if they were you. The emails could be ordinary spam, or attempts to gain even more personal information. A hacker can change your password so you can’t access your own account, and can delete your email messages and contacts.”
“Imagine a thief got Bob’s email password. That email account was connected to Bob’s credit card accounts and used in other communications where personal information was exchanged. Knowing the name of Bob’s credit card issuer and other information, the thief could take over the credit card account—changing the address on the account and requesting a new credit card be sent to that address.”
“If a hacker can see the businesses that you communicate with, they can call or email you posing as one of those businesses and try to steal even more information from you.”
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