Nasty surprises could be hiding in Black Friday offers

Many people are starting to feel a bit conflicted about the concept of Black Friday.

Is it a good thing to have early offers before Christmas? Or is it all just tat which they need to offload and which causes unseemly bunfights in publicity-hungry department stores?

Whatever your view, like anything popular it is inevitable that it will be latched onto by those who would part you with your money or data through schemes, scams and outright lies.

It’s amazing what some people will do when they think they’re getting a bargain and that’s the aspect of social engineering that criminals rely on when crafting their convincing capers.

Because we all expect our inboxes to fill with offers from high street or online retail names we recognise at this time of year, we might not be so cautious about why we were on that list and we might, therefore, not consider the consequences of following a link or opening an attachment.

Of course the moment you do that before checking the identity of the sender, you may have been caught. The consequences of that can be unthinkable for a personal computer and catastrophic for a work one.

More savvy users will smell a rat if the email address the message came from doesn’t tally with the company name, but you can’t easily teach an entire workforce all the nuances of that situation.

Take Away the Worry

So the better approach is to take it out of their hands. There are services which are updated almost constantly as these scams appear and which, if they’re protecting your networks and devices, will stop them ever reaching your users. Prevention, in this case as in many, is very definitely better than cure.

If you think that might be something that would help you to sleep better at night, give us a call for chat through the options. It doesn’t have to be a painful process to put these protections in place and you don’t need to swallow an IT jargon encyclopaedia before you speak to us.

We just hope it didn’t become your Black Friday for all of the wrong reasons!