Hi friend,

You probably received this text message this year: you have unpaid road tolls that need to be paid now to avoid fines and license suspension. 

Now, if you’re in IT, you know a suspicious phishing message when you see one. 🚨 But many people still don’t, and it took a year for this particular scam to infiltrate public awareness. Now that it has, it’s dying down—and there’s a new, more deceptive DMV scam to take its place.

Criminals are also now sending emails with QR codes rather than links to confuse both anti-malware filters and the user they target. Data from Microsoft Defender for Office 365 found that “more than 15,000 messages containing malicious QR codes are sent to the educational sector daily.”

Last year, 68% of cyberattacks involved a human element (Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report). Criminals are getting more sophisticated, and AI is helping their attacks to be more deceptive and adapt more quickly.

There’s a silver lining here though: this also means that employee training and awareness can significantly reduce your cybersecurity risk. 📉

Our blog shares how to help employees better understand how to recognize threats, how they can impact your business, and how to handle responding and reporting an attempt.   

As always, if you have questions, we’re here and happy to help. Just reply to this email or book a time to talk here.

We look forward to helping, 

Chaz Hager,

President 

P.S. For state and local governments (SLED) and K-12, from security to Managed Services, Northriver IT has access to the NASPO contract, a great purchasing vehicle that makes procurement easier and faster by purchasing within the contract and bypassing the RFP process. Learn more at NASPO, or reach out with any questions you may have. 

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