Blue Ridge Technology

50% of Phishing Attempts Impersonate Microsoft The old advice is still true: don’t trust anything you see on the internet. Within reason, of course: we work hard to make sure this blog is fact-based and trustworthy. But the big-picture advice is still good advice: how can you know for sure our team wrote this and that the whole post isn’t just the figment of a genAI’s imagination? There are signs, like the way this introduction is going. (Not your standard opening, that’s for sure!) So what’s our point? While you can learn a lot online, and you rely on it for a massive slice of your business, you still can’t take everything you see at face value. A recent report looked at a huge number of phishing attempts — those fraudulent emails that pretend to be from someone else and try to get you to give up sensitive information — and found that one company was the undisputed “leader”: more than ⅓ of phishing emails impersonating a brand chose Microsoft. If your business does business with Micr...

Protect Yourself from Identity Fraud with Digital Security When you read the word “fraud,” certain images come to mind: big businesses, financial firms, sketchy shell companies, pyramid schemes, slick hucksters taking advantage of a nonprofit— you get the idea. All of this seems very far removed from what you do as a small business leader. If your business deals directly with customers (like in retail or ecommerce), you might jump straight to something closer to theft, customers who try to buy from you using fraudulent methods or means. In reality, fraud affects more businesses more frequently than we tend to assume, including small businesses like yours. That’s because it takes forms most people don’t expect and catches small to midsize businesses unprepared. Small Businesses, Big Target It’s tempting to assume that fraudsters will only go after the biggest targets and the most lucrative paydays (like those big businesses and financial companies), not after smaller and “les...