Phishing / email scams

Why That Email From Your "Bank" Might Not Be From Your Bank

Every week, small business owners across British Columbia open an email that looks completely normal — an invoice from a supplier, a shipping notice, a message from their bank — and click without a second thought. Most of the time it's fine. But increasingly, it isn't. Phishing emails have gotten good enough that even careful, experienced people fall for them, and small businesses are being targeted just as often as large ones, sometimes more, because attackers know smaller companies often don't have a dedicated IT team watching for this stuff.

Here's what makes today's phishing emails harder to catch than the obvious ones from a few years ago. They don't come riddled with spelling mistakes or strange formatting anymore. They often use a real company's logo, mimic a real employee's tone, and sometimes even come from an account that's already been compromised, so it's genuinely a real person's email address sending it. A contractor in the Kootenays might get an email that looks exactly like it's from their accountant, asking them to update banking details before the next payment. A retail shop owner might get what looks like a Canada Post delivery notice with a link to "confirm an address." The goal in both cases is the same: get you to click, log in somewhere fake, or move money before you've had time to think it through.

The good news is that you don't need to become a cybersecurity expert to protect your business — you just need a few habits that make you naturally harder to fool. Slow down on anything asking you to act urgently, especially around money or login credentials; urgency is one of the biggest red flags in the book. Confirm unusual requests through a second channel, like a phone call, rather than replying to the email itself. And make sure multi-factor authentication is turned on everywhere it's offered, so that even if a password does get stolen, it isn't enough on its own to get an attacker into your accounts.

Phishing isn't going away, and honestly, it's only getting more convincing. But a business that trains its team to pause and verify, and has the right protections in place behind the scenes, is a much harder target than the one still hoping it just doesn't happen to them. If you're not sure where your business stands, or you just want a second set of eyes on your current setup, Roman Nexus Technology is based right here in the Kootenay Boundary region and happy to help you figure out where the gaps are before someone else finds them first.