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How businesses should be protecting themselves from cybersecurity threats in 2025

The cyber threats that businesses face today are deceptive, destructive, and targeted. They target large and small companies, exposing customers to financial damage and data theft. Nearly 88% of small business owners think their data is vulnerable to a cyberattack. With so many threats from all corners, the team at Ooma released a graphic packed with data on cybersecurity and tips on best practices.

How businesses should be protecting themselves from cybersecurity threats in 2025

Where Does Fraud Occur the Most in the United States?

Fraud can include many different types of scams from identity theft to phishing scams and other types of digital credit card fraud. In the United States fraud is on the rise with over a 25 percent increase in the first four months of 2021 alone when compared to earlier years.

Where Does Fraud Occur the Most in the United States? #Infographic

Phishing Emails Could Cost Your Entire

Eighty-five percent of all received emails are spam or phishing. Although it may usually seem to simply be an annoyance, the truth is that it can cost businesses thousands of dollars, or even cost the success of the entire business if the business is small enough. 


Of course, the cost to businesses is also in time, money, customer retention, and productivity. The problem is that phishing emails are very easy to miss. They can be deceptive and easy to fall for. In fact, 19.8% of employees click phishing links, and 1 in 25 branded emails are phishing attacks. 

Phishing Emails Could Cost Your Entire #Infographic

The Dangers of Home Title Theft

Let’s talk about the latest scam to hit the masses. Typically when you think about common ways people steal from you, you’re first to think about things such as card fraud, identity theft, and phishing.  A new threat that has been emerging is stealing from people in a new way - their home title and all of their equity that they worked so hard over the years to build up.  From the years 2015 to 2019, real estate and rental fraud was more than 2.6 times the rate of even credit card fraud. 


Here are the steps of a typical home title theft scam: 

The Dangers of Home Title Theft #Infographic

 


A recent PayPal phishing attack is attempting to steal users’ account credentials and other sensitive information that can be used for identity theft.

 

The phishing campaign is actively being carried out in the form of text messages that are pretended to be from PayPal, telling users that their account has been permanently limited and asking them to click on a link to verify their account. Usually when a suspicious or fraudulent activity on an account is detected by PayPal, the account’s status is set to "limited," which puts temporary restrictions on activities such as withdrawing, sending, or receiving money.

 

By clicking on the link given in the phishing message, users are taken to a phishing page where they are prompted to log in to their PayPal account. Logging in on the phishing page would send the users’ PayPal credentials to the attackers and the phishing page would even try to collect further information from users, such as their name, date of birth, address, bank details, and more.

 


The collected information can then provide an opportunity to attackers for identity theft and they can even gain access to other accounts using that information.

Active Phishing Campaign on PayPal Attempting to Steal Users’ Account Credentials

 


Web domain registrar GoDaddy just pulled an uncool prank on its employees by sending them an email phishing test that promised them a $650 holiday bonus. Employees who clicked the link in the email reported receiving another email 2 days later, where instead of receiving the promised holiday bonus, they were asked to take a training course on social engineering.

 

GoDaddy Tricked Employees into Believing they would Earn a Bonus

SMS Scams and how to identify them

Our world has changed quite a lot in the last two decades. With technology and the internet, everything is connected. This has also given a rise to scammers who try to scam people for money. Unwanted calls, messages, emails are all tactics used by scammers. They bombard people with this so that they can falsely extract information or money from them.

Most people identify the scammers and ignore them but few of them don’t recognize them and those poor people are usually the target. Scammers take advantage of a person’s naivete and scam them for money. During the pandemic, the number of scamming cases rose to an all-time high. This is due to the fact that a person is most vulnerable during a crisis.

SMS Scams and how to identify them #infographic

The Brands Most Impersonated for Phishing Attacks

 Phishing is one of the most common types of hacking. These phishing e-mails have links which when clicked, lead to shady and untrustworthy websites. It is via those websites that hackers try to retrieve your information. Not every Internet user has the sense or experience to detect these shady scam emails. The one reason that it can be hard to detect such emails at one glance is that they usually have usernames that are similar to the entity they are impersonating.

Say, if someone is new to the Internet and receives an email allegedly from Nokia, they might fall into the trap if they don't examine the e-mail address carefully and find 'Nokkia' instead of 'Nokia' written there. Big brands do not jumble up or fidget with the letters of their brand names, so that's a clear trap which gets overlooked by gullible people or those users that get carried away by what the e-mail contains, for instance, it can be a lottery.

The Brands Most Impersonated for Phishing Attacks #Infographic



Internet scams have become harder to detect lately, hence making it important to be very careful when visiting websites and opening emails that seem even slightly suspicious. There has been a new Netflix phishing scam that tries to steal users' login and credit card information and billing address by tricking them into updating their account. 


Cloud office security platform, Armorblox, spotted the phishing attack a few weeks ago when Netflix customers reported about receiving emails that were apparently from Netflix Support. The emails convinced customers that there was a problem in the verification of their personal details which was resulting in issues with their billing. This was followed by a warning that their accounts would be cancelled in 24 hours if they didn't manage to update their personal information. 


Clicking the provided link took customers to a website that looked everything like Netflix's original website. The website page asked users to part with their Netflix login credentials, billing address, and credit card details. Targeted users were then redirected to the actual Netflix home page after the phishing flow was complete. 

Netflix Phishing Attack Attempts to Steal Customers' Credit Card Details

The Top Covid-19 Frauds
In the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic, cybercriminals have unleashed a tidal wave of malware to steal identity information, passwords, banking information, and login details. The most common means of malware delivery are phishing emails and malicious websites. Have a look below for more information.

The Top Covid-19 Frauds #Infographic

The History of Phishing

The concept of phishing was developed by The Warez Community - often referred to as The Scene - in the 1990s. The Scene is an underground tech group that specializes in the distribution of copyrighted materials (i.e. film, music, games, etc). Before phishing even got its name, it began on AOL with random credit card generators.

The Scene would used these randomly generated credit card numbers to open fake AOL accounts under a previous phishing victim’s name. With this, The Scene used the victim’s hacked account to send even more phishing messages to the victim’s contacts - essentially, a never-ending process.

Eventually, AOL stepped up with new security measures that prevented the use of randomly generated credit card numbers; however, The Scene had already moved on to the next scam: fake AOL Administrator accounts. Hacking the system itself, The Scene had full control. To read more about the history and future of phishing, check out the infographic below.

The History of Phishing #infographic

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