This blog provides safety tips for you and your business this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
It is that time of year again when the huge US trend of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is upon us. With Black Friday gaining more and more popularity amongst consumers and retailers every year, and many of the retailers beginning the deals up to a week in advance, how can you be sure you are staying secure?
During Black Friday, attackers have a wide range of opportunities to carry out an attack, from creating a fake web page to capture peoples details, sending out phishing emails pretending to be from a retailer or redirecting users to a fake web page to capture data or obtain bank details.
How to Stay Safe on Black Friday & Cyber Monday
To keep your network safe please follow the below top tips:
- Only visit sites that use https
- Use a VPN while making transactions
- Encrypt all data where possible
- Avoid clicking on links in emails from unknown websites that claim to have the best deals
- Avoid clicking on links from unknown email senders
- Block known malicious sites and email senders
- If possible, don’t allow visits to retail sites and don’t allow transactions to be made on your company network
But don’t limit these tips just for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these are best practises which should be in place all the time.
How we can help you
Two of our latest offerings can assist you in securing your network. Our phishing simulation service can help you to gain an understanding of your employee’s ability to spot phishing emails as well as provide them with some awareness training around phishing. This service would be highly beneficial for companies with employees who aren’t technically savvy, and may not know or have heard about the threat of phishing emails.
Cisco Umbrella (previously OpenDNS) is another service that we can provide which assists in keeping your network secure. It will prevent users from visiting domains that are suspicious and don’t have legitimate DNS records. Cisco Umbrella will prevent access to these suspicious sites if users try to visit them, which can help prevent phishing and malware attacks.
Cisco Umbrella Example
Imagine an employee is on the business network using their workstation to find Black Friday deals. They google “Black Friday iPhone Amazon” and look through links trying to find the best deal. Some of these links could be malicious and use a suspicious domain name such as “amazon-offers.com”. Cisco Umbrella would prevent the user from accessing the malicious links as they don’t have the correct DNS record.
So this Black Friday and Cyber Monday we aren’t telling you that you have to hideaway in a cave and not take advantage of the retailers mega deals, we are just saying do this safely follow our tips and stay secure online.
