The holiday season is in full swing. People (including employees on work computers) use the internet to buy gifts both from the office and at the house. At the end of November, Black Friday kicked off a month of high-intensity online shopping. Last year, internet protection company BrandProtect found that almost 3,000 fraudulent Holiday shopping sites were registered. This year isn’t any better.
These fraudulent sites use “special savings” and “killer deals” as bait for phishing emails, and the scams infiltrate mobile apps and social media as well. Warn your users that the excitement of getting an amazing deal before it sells out often makes people ignore their tingling spidey-sense, and forget security policy. This is what these sites count on.
To make sure they don’t lose out on the “amazing time-limited offer!”, users will click on suspicious links without first hovering to see where it goes (if you hover your cursor over a link – don’t click – it will tell you where the link leads. If it doesn’t lead to the website that it’s claiming to be – Don’t click!). They instead open infected email attachments trying to get a great holiday deal. Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are both “held over” for several weeks now, users really need to STOP, LOOK, and THINK before they click.
This is a problem especially when an employee is using a mobile device to do their Holiday shopping. Insecure online behaviour by employees exposes your network resources and puts your company’s data at risk. Especially at this time of year, when a deal sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Warn your users. Your users are an essential part of your company’s defenses!
If you’re concerned about your company’s data security, call Technology by Design at 1-204-800-3166.
We can provide you with a Network Security Analysis, so you know where you are vulnerable, and how to fix it!
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