Top 3 Most Common Scams

 

Phishing scams - Phishing scams are generally email-based scams that ask for a service or look like Paypal/Amazon/Bank emails. Some of them really get sophisticated. Don’t click on any links in any email from any company unless you know them. A lot of times, those are spoofed websites. Instead, go directly to the site and log in to your account to check. 

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Invoice scams - Business owners get invoices for their domain names. The invoice has a lot of information because a lot of it is public. You can confirm on the spreadsheet if these are real. Designate one person in your staff to handle stuff like this. That way, your staff won’t go on and sign you up for a new domain. 

 

Award scams - Award scams will send emails for you to pay them money so you can claim your award. They usually have an option for your award to be shown on your website so they can take monthly charges from you. A lot of times, these are directory sites and it is their way to hook you in. 

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Cybersecurity Checklist for Small Businesses 

 

• Limit access to everything. Don’t have only one email address controlling everything in your organization. You don't want to give anyone the same email address and password that you have. 

 

• Every staff member has a separate email address that you control. Make your email address the super admin so you can manage all email subaccounts. You want to have email addresses that connect to your domain, not Gmail accounts because you have complete control over it. That way, if you and your staff break up in some horrible fashion, it’s just one click of a button, and their access is denied.

 

• Every staff has no more than manager access. This means that they’re not the admin to your website. You don’t want anyone to have admin access but yourself.

 

• Keep a spreadsheet with this information - Make sure to keep a spreadsheet of all your business information. Share it with as few people as possible. 

 

• For everyone, turn on two-factor authentication along with password-protecting devices. This means, when your staff logs in to whatever device they have to log in from, it has that text authentication to log in. The purpose for this is that, if your staff lose his/her phone or somebody hacks their computer, they won’t have access to your business information.
   

• Make sure backups are being taken at regular intervals and software is always up to date. Back-up systems are standard in every hosting platform, make sure that your website is backed up regularly. 

 

Those are some common scams and how you can protect your business from those.