A brief glance through my Spam folder in MDaemon Webmail today reminded me of the need for on-going education on the topic of phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams. Because businesses have already lost millions of dollars to these scams and continue to fall victim every day, it bears repeating that, while spam filters and secure email gateways continue to improve, no solution is 100% fool-proof.
Don’t Risk Losing your Life Savings to Scammers. Follow these 10 Tips to Identify a Phishing Email.
Whether you run a Fortune-500 organization or a small boutique, by now you should be aware of the threats posed by cyber criminals to trick you into clicking a link, downloading an attachment, or parting ways with your money.
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It's just a fact of life: If there's email, there will always be spam. Now, how much spam you have to deal with will depend on how good your spam filtering solution is. Here at MDaemon Technologies, we use our own products - MDaemon and Security Gateway, to filter out spam, malware, phishing attempts, and all of the other junk that often floods inboxes of users whose email server or hosted service isn't as effective.
In part one of our three-part series on Business Email Compromise (BEC), I explained what a BEC attack is and provided examples and statistics. As you’ll recall from the examples discussed, businesses have suffered staggering losses to these attacks, and while users are becoming more aware of them, their own human nature dictates that these threats will continue. In fact, a recent report by Get Safe Online indicated that over a third (37%) of employees don’t know what to look for to identify common email scams. The report also stated that one in 20 email fraud victims were so ashamed that they hid their mistakes from their colleagues.
This week, we continue our series on Business Email Compromise. Click here to read Part 1, which includes an overview and various statistics on this growing threat.
Before the invention of email, mail that arrived in your physical mailbox often contained pamphlets, sales brochures, credit card offers, and product catalogs. Much of this waste was thrown away and ended up in a landfill somewhere. Today, the equivalent and often more annoying nuisance is spam. Spam comes in many forms, and has evolved from dubious product claims, miracle supplements, conspiracy theories, and offers of easy money to more malicious threats such as ransomware attacks and targeted spear-phishing.
Many businesses are responsible for maintaining large amounts of confidential data, including customer records, medical records, financial reports, legal documents, and much more. It’s very common for these types of information to be transmitted via email, especially as the Covid-19 pandemic has forced many businesses to embrace working from home. So how can you ensure confidential data transmitted via email is kept private? How can you ensure the integrity of transmitted data?
Has this happened to you? Let’s say you’re the MDaemon administrator for your company, and you’ve noticed that somewhere, somehow, spam messages are being sent from within your network. Perhaps one of your PCs has been compromised. What do you do? Here are some tips to help you track the issue down.
With the prevalence of spam circulating the globe in massive amounts, it becomes increasingly important for administrators to understand the potential causes of their IP address ending up on a blacklist. Spammers employ all kinds of tricks to try to send out as many spam messages as possible without revealing their identities. They do this through various techniques such as social engineering, employing malware, botnets, forging of message headers, and exploiting weaknesses in email systems or network infrastructures. For the spammer, it’s basically a numbers game. It costs next to nothing to send out thousands of spam messages, and if even a small handful of people click on a link or purchase a product advertised in a spam message, the spammer can profit.
If your email infrastructure is not properly secured, then you risk being infected with malware and becoming part of a spam botnet. Even if your server is not infected with malware, if your firewall and mail server security settings are not configured properly, your IP address could wind up on a blacklist. To protect yourself from being blacklisted, consider the following recommendations:
