These days, see a call from an unknown number and you typically just let it go to voice mail. If it’s important, the caller will leave a message, right? With text messages though, while you may feel confident that you can spot a pesky road toll text scam from a very long distance, phishing scams by text are becoming ever more sophisticated and trickier to identify.
And while we all know never to give an unsolicited caller remote access to our computer or provide personal, credit card, or online account details over the phone, sometimes we do. Just look at the scam statistics published by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) for a sobering insight into how the latest scams are extracting hard earned cash and valuable personal data from more than a handful of individuals and businesses. Last year, 239,225 reported scams netted more than half a billion dollars for scammers.
Phishing scams more difficult to spot
This year in January alone, attempts to gain personal information by phone amounted to more than $2 million in losses. There were also more than 7,100 reports of text message scams that led to more than $933,000 in losses. And a further $727,265 was lost in the month to the increasingly lucrative remote access scam, where a caller tries to convince you that you have a computer or internet problem and that you need to buy new software to fix the problem right away.
Remember, anyone can fall victim to a phishing attack. But if you’re confident you’d never fall for anything like this, and are comfortable your staff are all suitably trained to avoid these attacks, why not gauge how well you can spot phishing scams by taking the ACSC’s five-minute quiz.
As always, for help and support on mobile device and data cybersecurity, reach out to the team at imei. Our experts can help you safeguard your company from the ongoing changes in mobile cybersecurity risk that goes beyond the conventional enterprise mobility management (EMM) and mobile device management (MDM) solutions.
