As the Managing Partner of Dr.Backup, I receive 100s of email messages each day. Many are technical in nature, but some are typical business correspondence.
Prior to any message getting to me, it is scanned by a third party email filtering service that claims to use six antivirus detection engines.
Once the message arrives inside our network, it is scanned again by a local security package, examined by Outlook, and finally winds up in my inbox.
Sounds pretty secure, right? WRONG. Consider the following email I received this morning:
From: assistant@minncast.com [mailto:assistant@minncast.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:36 AM
To: Mitchell Romm
Subject: RE: RE: invoice #47142433220
I tried to call you but no answer.
Your invoice can be viewed by clicking below:
Invoice 47142433220
Please give me a call when you have paid.
Regards,
Brandon Ford
TEL: (775) 527-0170
Fax: (775) 527-8141
Email: assistant@minncast.com
On Thu, May 18th 2017 at 4:33 PM mromm@drbackup.net wrote:
I spoke to our accountant, we have not received the invoice.
Looks like ordinary business correspondence — but it’s not!
Originally, adjacent to the line starting with the word “Invoice,” was a linked field in the message appearing to indicate the invoice number of the unpaid bill. As it turns out, that link represents nothing but TROUBLE !
What do you think the chances are of an accounts payable clerk getting this message and clicking through to peek at the outstanding invoice…and opening “Pandora’s box.” (hint: Pretty high.)
The latest generation of nasty viruses (including “Wannacry”) not only infect the clerk with an encryption virus, but that single action could possibly also put at risk the data from every device attached to the local area network. (Believe it!)
Tell me realistically, how confident are you that ANY real time security package can reliably identify ALL bad links and save an unsuspecting user from a meltdown?
I think by now, you get the point.
Plain and simple, the only sure way to protect your business from the unexpected, is to have a recent offsite copy of your critical business data.
If you don’t know when your last offsite/online backup was performed, please give Dr.Backup a call at 301-560-4534 or write us at info@drbackup.net. We help get you ready for the unthinkable.