Phish Food for Thought

In a story that shouldn’t surprise anyone any more, we should be reminded how important it is to stress the need for vigilance with regard to cybersecurity amongst our workplaces and family, especially as many businesses have had to adopt new ways of working to accommodate lockdowns, tiers and isolation/shielding.

This story highlights a few things, and not just the point that some cyber-criminals take their holidays in August:

• cyber-attacks can happy to anyone, not just household business names.
• not only are they attacking HMRC, but often they are impersonating HMRC in order to panic people into responding.
• not all scams come through the interweb; telephone scams are increasing, too. (If you know it is a scam, the phone calls can be quite amusing.)
• proving they are down with the parents, (or maybe just targeting older users?), SMS based scams — Smishing, no less — are still prevalent.
• the flurry of Covid related support schemes, and rapid updates, make attacks actually easier amongst the confusion.

HMRC have also urged taxpayers to beware of contact from potential fraudsters and to report any suspicious messages as the self-assessment deadline approaches – it is at this time of year when HMRC sends thousands of messages and emails to taxpayers about the upcoming deadline and so fraudsters also ramp up their activity.

Fortunately there are some simple things you can do to keep on the safer side – find out how our WV Solutions team can help you stay vigilant.