Why Phishing Scams Specifically Target Small to Medium Sized Businesses

Email scams can target anyone at any time, be it an individual, an SME, or a large enterprise. However, every type of cyberthreat has its own ‘target segment,’ and there are particular email scams which target small to medium sized businesses more than larger enterprises or individuals. Let us first take a look at what phishing emails are exactly to begin with.

What Exactly Are Phishing Emails?

Phishing is a multifaceted scam, which often begins with a phishing email containing the harmful link. They will look identical in their formatting, style, language, use of logo, etc., to the authentic company/sender that the email is pretending to be from. Phishing emails will contain a link that can either infect the computer and the whole connected network with malware, or it could lead to an external page.

This external page will also look identical to the authentic sender’s login page, prompting the user to enter their account ID and password. On doing so, the user’s account on the authentic site gets immediately compromised, along with all their personal, financial and company/client data that was associated with that account. They could appear to be from the CEO of the company itself, an authentic antimalware provider, a vendor that the company is in regular contact with, or just about any other party that feels both familiar with and relevant to the company’s employees.

Why Do Most Phishing Email Scams Prefer SMEs?

There are multiple reasons why smaller businesses receive the highest number of phishing emails:

• A number of small businesses in rural areas, semiurban districts and remote towns operate without even the most basic cybersecurity measures in place
• An even larger number of small businesses across all major and minor business hubs of the country operate with insufficient and/or outdated cybersecurity protocols
• An astounding number of smaller companies still believe that they are too small to be targeted by hackers, scammers and other types of cyberthreats
• SMEs are easier targets for scam emails than large enterprises with high-quality cybersecurity protocols in place
• Small businesses are also more profitable targets, as compared to the random individual.

Can Smaller Companies Afford the Latest IT Management and Cybersecurity Services?

Large enterprises have such tight-security systems in place that scam emails would not even get through to the inbox in most instances. Therefore, it makes more sense for cyber frauds to target companies who are not even aware that they are on anyone’s radar. SMEs often consider high-quality IT and cybersecurity management to be too costly for them, which is quite unfortunate. Even the smallest of establishments can afford state-of-the-art cybersecurity measures today. Just check this page on Iconic IT, which explains how their various scalable IT and cybersecurity management plans are designed to suit budgets of all size.

There are of course, a few easy ways to detect most phishing scams, but all it takes is a single oversight from one employee after a long and tiring day to compromise the entire organization, as well as multiple others associated with the breached company. When employees keep receiving multiple of these every day, failure to verify the sender ID is almost inevitable at some point or the other. The only way to prevent phishing emails from compromising a company is to have a proper IT & cybersecurity management system in place, which is capable of preventing the scam emails from ever getting through to a company inbox.