Protecting yourself and your company from cybercriminals means staying ahead of fraud trends and educating employees about preventing them. Two common threats, smishing and phishing, exploit people and businesses through deceptive text messages and emails to gather sensitive information.
While phishing uses fake emails to trick you into clicking malicious links or revealing personal or company information, smishing uses SMS text messages impersonating a legitimate text, trying to get you to click on a link or call a scam phone number.
These attacks can lead to lost personal funds and information, but also devastate businesses, causing compromised bank accounts, stolen customer data, ransomware infections, and significant financial losses that can drastically affect a business’s operations.
How Do Smishing & Phishing Work?
Cybercriminals increasingly target both individuals and businesses through email and text messages, knowing that just one successful attack can get them the funds or the sensitive information they want. By pretending to be a vendor, a company, or even a grandchild, these criminals try to get sensitive data ranging from personal financial account information to corporate systems and customer databases.
Common tactics range from creating a false sense of urgency around financial matters to impersonating business partners with fake contract issues. Scammers frequently send fake delivery notifications, payment requests, and account verification messages. They've also become adept at hiding malicious links through website link shorteners and using email addresses that look very much like legitimate domain addresses. Scammers' strategies have grown more sophisticated, partly due to artificial intelligence, making these messages harder to detect.
How Can You Spot Smishing & Phishing?
Protecting your organization from cyber threats requires understanding common characteristics of these attacks. Your first line of defense against smishing texts and phishing emails (also known as business email compromise or BEC) is training your team to identify suspicious messages. Here are some common traits:
Smishing Text Red Flags
Unexpected, urgent texts about business accounts or payments - Texts appearing to be from your financial institution about unauthorized transactions that prompt you to click a malicious link or provide sensitive information
- Texts masquerading as a toll operator about past-due tolls, prompting you to click a malicious link to pay
- Texts or phone calls claiming to be a grandchild or relative in urgent need of money
- Shortened URLs masking suspicious website links
- Any texts requiring immediate financial decisions or asking for sensitive information (personal or business)
- Requests to call unfamiliar numbers about personal financial or business matters
Phishing Email Red Flags
- Urgent emails about financial matters requiring immediate action
- Emails impersonating family members, especially targeting Private Wealth clients, with urgent financial requests
- Threats about accounts, taxes, or compliance issues
- Emailed financial requests that bypass normal business processes
- Suspicious attachments or links to unfamiliar websites
- Subtle misspellings in sender addresses or domains
What Can Happen If I Click On A Malicious Link?
For businesses, phishing and smishing attacks can devastate operations through multiple channels, and direct financial losses from unauthorized transactions are just the beginning. Companies often face legal fees, costs from implementing emergency security measures, and potential regulatory fines for failing to protect sensitive data. Beyond immediate financial impact, these security breaches can paralyze operations, leading to lost productivity while systems are secured. The reputational fallout can be equally severe as customers lose trust in your business to keep their data safe. This loss of confidence often leads to lost clients, damaged business relationships, and skeptical investors, creating long-term challenges for growth and stability.
For individuals, the consequences can be personally destructive. Clicking malicious links can lead to drained bank accounts, stolen credit card information, and compromised personal data that takes months or years to fix. Particularly heartbreaking are grandparent scams, where criminals pose as grandchildren in desperate situations — claiming to be injured, jailed, or stranded abroad - and urgently requesting wire transfers. These scams exploit emotional connections to steal life savings, often leaving victims not only financially damaged but also deeply distressed. Recovering from personal cyber-attacks can involve lengthy battles to fix identity theft, creating financial hardship and emotional trauma.
What Should You Do With Suspicious Messages & Emails?
Never click links in suspicious emails or unexpected text messages, even if they appear to be from your bank or a known business. Instead:
- Send suspicious texts to 7726 (SPAM), which allows wireless companies to track and block scammers.
- Delete suspicious messages after reporting them.
- Contact legitimate banks, companies, and relatives using their official contact information (not from the scam message) from a previous invoice, statement, corporate website, or from another relative.
- Never share sensitive business or personal information via email or text.
- Keep all your cell phones, mobile devices, and computers up to date with security features updated.
- Slow down and verify unusual requests through established channels.
- Access all business and personal accounts only through official websites.
Remember to double-check all details and trust your instincts. If a message seems unusual or creates pressure to act quickly, pause and verify through proper channels. Train your team that it's always better to take extra time verifying than to compromise your business's security.
