4 Seconds A Day To Avert Disaster
And Countless Hours of Aggravation & Embarrassment
A few Saturday mornings ago, I got off the phone with a friend of mine, he is the CEO of another company.
What prompted the call was that I received an email from him, that came from his mailbox, inviting me to click on a link to open a document entitled “RFP response.”
It was obviously a suspicious email, and anyone clicking on the link would have launched a file containing malware. I had to phone him up to tell him that his mailbox had just been compromised.
The frustrating part is that many people still refuse to have multi-factor authentication turned on.
Whether he got his password phished or they stole his password through some other means, I’m not sure. But he had to get his IT department to remediate the attack and, I can tell you, that it’s a major pain in the butt…
He’s going to have to notify nearly a thousand people who were in his contact list that the malicious message was sent to. And his IT folks are going to have to do a whole bunch of cleanup work to figure out what the attacker may have done with the settings in his Office 365 account.
All of this trouble could have been avoided had he just turned on multi-factor authentication.
When we have conversations with clients about turning on MFA, it’s often the executives that are the ones who tend to push back the most. They don’t want to deal with the “inconvenience” of having to pull out their smartphone to get the MFA codes or click “Approve” when they login in the morning.
Even when we work with internal I.T. Departments, when we try to encourage them to turn on MFA, especially for their executive teams, we get a ton of pushback. We would hear things like “Oh… the CEO and the President?… there’s no way they’re going to be willing to go through those extra steps!”
So it’s often the executives or the business owners who are the ones willing to take the risk!
To have your mailbox compromised by an attacker that uses it to send out hundreds of malware infected email messages to all of your contacts is really embarrassing. It also puts those people and their businesses at risk because they lower their guard, thinking that the message actually came from a legitimate contact.
There are their suppliers, their customers, all of their friends and colleagues… These attacks could haunt them for months or years to come because it’s hard to tell if they copied any contact lists or email folders that could contain sensitive information. These risks can be mitigated by turning on MFA.
If you’re a current client, I know we’ve had conversations with you about MFA and if you’ve still been holding off on getting this important layer of security enabled, now is the time to get it in place!
Our team will turn on the security settings for you in the Microsoft 365 Admin console and provide you and your users with all the steps needed to get it setup on your own. Or if you’d prefer a full “white glove” solution, we can provide that to you as well to help each of your team member one-on-one to help them get it all setup.
If you’re not a current client and you’d like help getting this setup, give us a call today.
Once it is setup and you have the app installed on your phone, it’s literally four seconds!
Login, pull out your phone, get the six digit code or hit the “Approve Sign-In” button and you’re good to go!
Aren’t those four seconds worth it?
It’s time you turned on multi-factor authentication for **everything** today!
It will save you a ton of aggravation, a ton of embarrassment, and possibly months or years of work that is needed to clean up the mess when they hack into an account that doesn’t have MFA enabled.
