Are you protected against cyber threats?
Nobody wants to be that person who takes down the IT systems for the day, this a frank and honest article from the owner of a small IT consultancy practice asking for your help. All I ask is that you read this article and think twice before you open an email or every time you download something from the internet.
At Fusion we pride ourselves on being proactive and ensuring that your IT systems work tirelessly for you throughout the year. We use state of the art SPAM protection, we install industry standard antivirus protection, but we need you to be vigilant. Having all these measures in place is a bit like going for your annual flu jab, you hope it will keep you safe but you always run that risk of getting the dreaded flu (and plenty of people do). The flu vaccine is actually tweaked every year to ensure it protects against the latest incarnation of the virus, Its the same with all these measures we have in place though some are updated hourly to keep up with the ever increasing variations of attacks.
What can you do to protect yourself? Before you click think;
- Do you even know this person? If not proceed with extreme caution. Certainly do not open any attachments.
- If you do know the person is the person using the right language?
- Double click on the email address to ensure its correct as someone could be just spoofing a name.
- Does the email seem too good to be true? If so it probably is.
- Does the email have an attachment that you aren’t expecting? If so DO NOT OPEN IT
- Any email (that you haven’t requested) with links to website asking you to reset passwords / confirm purchases which are unknown to you please do not click on the link.
- If a word document asks you to enable a macro, chances are that’s the virus asking for permission to run..
- Do not even reply to these emails, just perform a shift delete to remove the email.
Above all please just ask, the chances are if you are unsure then it probably is suspect. We would prefer to spend 2 minutes checking rather than a day sorting out a ransomware attack and all the repercussions of customers losing days of data.
Here are some examples of what these messages can look like;
There is a nice video on the BBC website that also explains some of the basics.
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