Tax season is stressful enough for people and businesses, and cybercriminals definitely don’t help. Scam artists ramp up their efforts this time of year to steal tax information and W-2s of small business employees.

How do they do this? Simple, they pose as the IRS and contact businesses to claim that they need more information or that they have a refund available to them. In addition to the attempted phishing attack, the emails these hackers send often have attachments in them that lead to fake websites that will allow the cybercriminal to gain access to the victim’s computer.

It may seem simple to you to identify a fake IRS correspondence, but over time hackers have perfected the art of making fake emails from government organizations look legit. All it takes is one careless employee to infect an entire company’s network. However…

How to Immediately Tell a Tax Scam

As Time.com so eloquently put, the IRS does not initiate contact with taxpayers through email, text messages or social media! Any message you receive through these avenues should be outright deleted on sight.

The IRS contacts businesses through U.S. mail, and wants businesses to send tax information to them the same way.

Now that you know how to easily tell if a scam artist is trying to fool you, spread the word! Employees fall for this because they just don’t know. They see an email that has the official IRS logos and it’s worded very officially, and it even has a link to a website that looks just like the IRS website and they don’t even think twice. It’s not necessarily that they’re even being neglectful, it’s that they don’t even know that phishing attacks like this exist.

Educating Employees

The most important way to prevent phishing attacks like these is to educate every single employee on the tell-tale signs. Include a policy for your company that warns about the dangers of emails with attachments on them or phone calls from sketchy numbers. Once every employee reads and signs off on this document, that alone goes a long way in preventing a cataclysmic data breach.

You can also choose to work with a cloud service provider that is an expert on dealing with hackers and making sure they never touch your data. TOSS C3 offers 24/7/365 monitoring and maintenance of your network, meaning that not only is a watchful eye constantly protecting your IT systems, but that they are even upgraded as soon as a patch becomes available.

For more information on the cloud and how it can protect your business, please read our White Pages or you can call us anytime at 1-888-884-8677.