How to protect yourself from falling victim of cybercrime

Companies can help protect their employees from becoming phishing victims by putting a good email phishing and business email compromise strategy in place, especially over the festive season when there is a dramatic rise in spam, promotional emails and phishing emails.

READ: E-mail to jail: The Cybercrime Bill and whether you should worry

This according to Charl Ueckermann CEO at AVeS Cyber Security, who added that phishing emails are always made to look like the real thing from banks, popular social networking websites, retailers, internet service providers and sometimes even as a company’s email administrator.

“As phishing emails are so well disguised, conventional email security solutions can fail to detect them at some point,” he said.

Ueckermann offers some tips for employers to guide employees on keeping their business email inboxes clean:

• Don’t use company emails for social media profiles
• Don’t buy anything online using company emails
• Don’t wait for someone to teach you safe email practices – self-educate and ask experts in the organisation. There are many free resources made available by industry experts via social media, such as how-to videos and quick-tips articles.
• Understand the dangers of opening or clicking on links in emails
• Treat unsolicited emails requesting sensitive information with suspicion
• When subscribing to websites, use other email accounts, such as a separate Gmail account
• Don’t sign-up for newsletters using business email addresses.