Protect Your Business from Phishing Attacks

The current hot topic that you may have heard of is cyber crime and fraud that targets construction companies. The bad guys can trick an employee into clicking a link that plants malware on their network. This allows them to monitor the email traffic and then submit a fraudulent email directly to one of the construction customers asking them to divert a large invoice payment to another account. This has been identified as a growing national trend.

Although this particular phishing attempt is targeted at the building trade, there are many variations. Here are a few steps you can take to safeguard your business regardless of the type.

• Confirm requests for transfers of funds by using phone verification as part of a two-factor authentication and verify/use previously known phone numbers.
• Carefully scrutinize all email requests for transfer of funds.
• Create an email rule to flag email communications where the “reply” email address is different from the “from” email address shown.