The Dark Web and Phishing: Unfriendly Neighbors

Industry:

 

Quickly evolving travel and social requirements in response to COVID-19 mean that, like it or not, organizations are asking traditional office-based employees to work from home.

Today’s technology allows that to happen in many cases with relative ease; however, are your employees prepared with the necessary knowledge to keep themselves and the network safe under these circumstances?

Being proactive in cyber security is a multi-faceted effort. Dark web monitoring is essential in today’s world, where your usernames and passwords could, quite literally, be for sale. Similarly, and very closely related, human prevention is one of the last lines of defense in a multi-layered approach to cyber security.

At Certified CIO, we recommend to our customers to engage in both Dark Web monitoring and Phishing training.

What is the dark web?

Glad you asked. Wikipedia defines it as:

The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets, overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the Web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.

The darknets which constitute the dark web include small, friend-to-friend peer-to-peer networks, as well as large, popular networks such as Tor, Freenet, I2P, and Riffle operated by public organizations and individuals.

And on Phishing:

Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Typically carried out by email spoofing or instant messaging, it often directs users to enter personal information at a fake website which matches the look and feel of the legitimate site.

Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques being used to deceive users. Users are often lured by communications purporting to be from trusted parties such as social web sites, auction sites, banks, online payment processors or IT administrators.

Security Awareness Training, i.e. anti-phishing training (among other things), is a standard part of Certified CIO’s managed IT service offerings.

Okay, so what now?

Well, a few things.

Protect yourself! Certified CIO offers MFA as part of our suite of managed IT service packages. This is a standard for modern MSP breach prevention processes.

Educate yourself and your employees! We can help you set up training campaigns to get you and your staff members set up to identify and act against fraudulent emails.

Wait! I have questions! We’re happy to answer your questions. Please contact us or give us a call!

 

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