When we’re talking about security and like who’s getting hacked out there, what’s the data actually showing for who’s getting hit? And you would think it would be the big companies, but more often than not it’s the small to medium sized businesses that are getting hit.
So the most common attacks you’ll see on small medium businesses are ransomware, but I would say primarily it’s social engineering attacks. It’s because for small medium businesses, it’s a low-hanging fruit.
What social engineering means
By social engineering attacks, I mean that someone will pretend to be a company or a service and they’ll ask you for your name, your number, your credit card information.
Everyone’s gotten spam calls before, but I think as we enter in this age of AI it’s going to get a lot worse. There’s a lot more info about people out there. These spam callers have access to all this info because it’s just on the internet. They’re going to be able to use AI to personalize the conversation, maybe make themselves sound better, maybe make themselves sound like a relative of yours.
And so the social engineering part of this whole revolution of AI is a big concern.
The calls will sound official
Look, it’s maybe not happening to people now, but you’re going to get phone calls from people that sound very official. It won’t have the obvious signs of scams. There’ll be very official AI sounding calls that you can get, and they’ll be asking you to come in or pay money, pay debts.
How to check a caller or a link
Thankfully, there’s a few tips and tricks that you want to keep in mind when you’re dealing with these social engineering attacks. And I’ll throw in a few tips that I use myself whenever I’m evaluating this random caller that calls me in and says they need me to pay a bill.
Take your own risks and do your own research before you implement anything like this. This is not advice or anything, this is just what I do and I’m sharing that.
I want to verify the URL. What you want to look for is before the slash is the domain. Before the slash and the dot is going to be the real domain. So make sure that’s verified. If it’s misspelled or it looks funny, you might be dealing with something bad.
Always search on domains that you know. If you get a call and say like there’s a bill you need to pay and you’re actually concerned that there might be a bill, do not click on any links, do not call any phone numbers that they give you.