It’s that most wonderful  time of the year, when hearts and wallets open wide. It’s also a year, thanks to the pandemic, in which many of us – including employees – are shopping while Home for the Holidays. Unfortunately, scammers are well aware of this and phishing like crazy.

Adding to the concern:  Over 60% of Canadians plan to shop from cell phones or other mobile devices. This is an increase of 20% over last year.

Why worry? Depending on whose research you read, anywhere from 53 – 69% of people leave their phones unlocked. Which means that your corporate data may be at risk from prying eyes and sticky fingers, if people are shopping at the mall.

Step One: Insist that employees and family members lock their phones.

What else can you do? Besides upping your edge and endpoint security?

• Encourage people to separate work and personal devices – especially if you work for a municipality or are in education or healthcare, the hardest hit of industries for ransomware in 2020. Better yet, given the number of people using their own phones in this BYOD era, provide network access security and install endpoint security on all mobile devices.  Yes – offer it for personal devices, too.
• Only download shopping apps from trusted sources such as the Amazon App Store, Apple App Store, Google Play Store, etc.
• Ho-Ho-Hold on before clicking on that sales link. We all know that if a deal seems too good to be true, that’s usually the case. For some reason, people are less cautious at Christmas. Remind everyone in your personal and professional network to be on the lookout for phishing scams and ransomware.  They’ll arrive, much like Santa in the night, in email notices containing appeals from fake charities (and some of the children’s ones can make you cry ), fake shipping notifications, fake order confirmations and a myriad of other things to tempt you.
  One of one of our partners, KnowBe4, whose offering integrates well with Cisco solutions, has a solution to identify scam email before it’s opened. They are offering quality resource kit, which you can access at: https://bit.ly/2K8wtor
• Fa-la-la form jacking. Form jacking? That’s when cyber thieves hijack payment forms on popular shopping websites, to steal personal and credit card data. You make a purchase from a reputable vendor, only to have your data snatched and sold on the dark web. You have no way of knowing, so it’s critical you check your credit card statements more regularly at this time of year. Even better, use prepaid credit card when shopping online.

Even though you may be avoiding holiday crowds and pickpockets this year, cyber criminals are still stalking you.  So…

Please contact us at [email protected] or (416) 429-0796 or 1.877.238.9944 (toll Free) to learn more about adding KnowBe4 , Amp, Umbrella or Duo (all great tools in the fight against felons) to your security arsenal.

In the meantime, we wish you happy and safe shopping!