The most common form of cybercrime is committed via social engineering. This is done by sending emails to unsuspecting employees using techniques like baiting, scareware, pretexting, and the most common method of phishing. Those pesky emails can do real damage to your cash flow and the viability of your firm. Since the transfer was authorized by you or your employee it would not be reimbursed by your bank.
While I ran a technology company our accountant received a fraudulent email she thought was from me and transferred $40,000 to a bad actor. Fortunately, we had a procedure in place to recover the money and were very fortunate to have the money back in our account a couple of weeks later. Many other businesses have not been as lucky. Cybersecurity Ventures estimates cybercrime costs $6 trillion annually worldwide, up from $3 trillion in 2015.
What can you do….
There are many things businesses can do to protect their financial assets, customers’ information, and proprietary information. They can range from free to moderate to expensive solutions. Solutions include:
Make sure you are updating patches on your operating systems
Have procedures in place requiring an invoice and a receiving document prior to payment. For amounts over a certain limit require multiple approvals.
Provide low-cost phishing training to your employees.
Work with a managed services provider or managed security provider to evaluate and close vulnerabilities in your network.
Activate 2-factor authentication
Work with a broker to examine the benefits of cyber liability insurance.
Matchbooks team members have close to 100 years of technology and accounting experience and offer bookkeeping, accounting, and consulting services. If you would like to learn more about how our team can assist your team in reducing IT and accounting risks we are here to help you.
Matchbooks is a virtual bookkeeping and consulting company. We help companies like yours make more informed decisions, increase cash flow and improve daily operations. For more information contact us at consulting@matchbooksusa.com