What happens when you click that link? A Simple Case Study of a Local New Hampshire Small Business.

In recent weeks, major corporations such as AT&T, American Express, and Bank of America have faced significant data breaches. Let's shift our focus from the targeting of larger companies to a small, 42-person local New Hampshire company, where Trusted Internet intervened upon the first indication of a potential breach. 

Within just one hour of notification, Trusted Internet implemented email scanning and quarantine services in the small company, swiftly isolating dozens of suspicious emails already present in users' inboxes. Despite the presence of antivirus software such as Trend and Defender on company machines, nearly a third of the phishing attempts aimed at stealing credentials had already infiltrated the inboxes of the 40-person firm. 

In the following week, over 500 malicious emails were intercepted, with almost a third having evaded detection by Defender. Most of these missed emails were identified as attempts to extract sensitive credentials. To shed light on the nature of these threats, our head of engineering recorded a brief video dissecting one of the links extracted from a phishing email, elucidating its workings and potential dangers.  It’s a simple use case but illustrates one way, in three minutes, how hackers try to trick you into giving up your credentials.

If you find yourself in an inbox emergency, and you run email on your own domain (not a personal account), on O365 or Google Suite, we offer small businesses no-cost trial licenses for up to two weeks.

For more information, contact Trusted Internet at staysafeonline@trustedinternet.io. Mention this blog.