In 2014, a whole new method for spamming began to emerge - Snowshoe Spam. It works like this: Spammers use botnets to send a huge amount of spam at a low volume per IP address, which makes it harder to prevent. According to Cisco, snowshoe senders increased from 7% in 2013 to 15% in 2014. Of course, anti-spam technology and security companies who learn everything they can about how to prevent spam started improving their defenses against snowshoe - which encouraged spammers to update and improve their techniques… In 2016, the Cisco Talos and Umbrella research teams identified an evolved version of snowshoe known as “hailstorm.” Hailstorm still relies on a large army of botnets that send a low volume of spam per IP … [Read more...] about How to Prevent Spam with 6 Proven Tips
How to Prevent Phishing: 10 Tips
With a single click of your mouse, you could lose your identity, your savings, and your business - hook, line, and sinker. If you’d rather keep those things, then you need to learn how to prevent phishing. Today, anyone can be deceived by “phishers,” and no industry or organization is immune, regardless of its size. According to the Anti-Phishing Work Group (APGW), the total number of phishing attacks in 2016 was 1,220,523, a 65% increase over 2015. To help put that into perspective, the total number of phishing attacks per month in the 4th quarter of 2004 was 1,609. In the 4th quarter of 2016, APGW saw an average of 92,564 phishing attacks per month. That’s a 5,753% increase in phishing over 12 years. Phishers are … [Read more...] about How to Prevent Phishing: 10 Tips
In-House Exchange vs Hosted Exchange: What You Need to Know
When it comes to in-house Exchange vs hosted Exchange, many companies are faced with the hard decision between keeping what they know or jumping into the unknown. According to the Radicati Group, in 2014, 83% of Microsoft Exchange users were deploying it in-house, while only 17% were using cloud-based Office 365 or hosted Exchange servers. These figures make it seem like hosted Exchange is either too new to be adopted by established SMB’s and enterprises, or that it simply can’t compete with the offerings of an in-house server. But, that’s not the whole story… Radicati Group has projected that cloud-based Exchange deployments will rise from $8.7 billion in 2015 to $34.9 billion in 2019. These figures give us a better idea … [Read more...] about In-House Exchange vs Hosted Exchange: What You Need to Know
Business Email Compromise: 10 Ways to Prevent 5 Common Scams
You or your company could be one of the 22,000 victims of a business email compromise scam and never even know it. That’s because it’s no longer that Nigerian prince asking you to wire him money so he can save his people - hopefully you, like most people, know emails like that are BS. Now the scam is less obvious: it’s your CxO emailing you, asking you to pay for the latest business expense. Except, it’s not actually your CxO emailing you, there is no business expense, and now your company’s money is in the hands of a cyber criminal halfway across the world. This is the new kind of email fraud and it’s making 21st-century con artists filthy rich. In 2016, The FBI issued a public service announcement stating that roughly … [Read more...] about Business Email Compromise: 10 Ways to Prevent 5 Common Scams