 Hi everyone this is Darlene coming to you from Arizona and I'm Emma coming to you from California. With business down in the world staying home online attackers have ramped up their efforts in hopes that people get sloppy. It's a good time to revisit some tips to help keep your business and customers safe from online attackers and scammers and that's what we're going to cover today. Protecting your business from social engineering and attacks. Social engineering is the act of tricking someone into divulging information or taking action usually through technology like a simple email to your business. The idea behind social engineering is to take advantage of a potential victims natural tendencies and emotional reactions or in the case of your business it might look like a legitimate request to use your business. Yeah social engineering can take a few different forms the most common is fishing. Fishing can come in an email or text to help the attacker gain access to passwords or even accounts. Sometimes it can even be targeted to the weakest link in your household or business. Yeah I recently heard a story about an attacker who used LinkedIn to identify an entire team of people to launch a fishing attack using the names of the team members against each other. Sadly they were able to get enough information to access the company's network posing as the company's own IT department and verifications and that's super scary. Super scary yeah so we have four tips to help you combat social engineering attacks to your business. Number one slow down attackers rely on emotion and they rely on pressure so often a response is needed immediately just slow down and don't react until you do a little investigating. Also check the email address. Does it look weird? Is there just one character off? That's your first sign and it's not legit just slow things down. Number two call the person back if you get an email requesting information about your business or people working at your business manually call the person who appears to be making the request. If the request appears to be coming from an employee or customer use the phone number you have on file to respond to the request don't use the number the request it provides in the email. Number three send an email to the person making the request do not reply to the request but send a new message manually typing in the correct email address to confirm the ask. Number four don't click on the links check the email out first links can sometimes lead to a virus that can manipulate your computer system and hold it for ransom. This manipulation can shut down your entire computer system affecting your business just by clicking on an unknown link you could be putting your client's information your employee's information and any records that you keep in jeopardy. There's certainly more ways that attackers will try to gain access to your business but if you stay diligent on the easier attacks you greatly reduce your risk. Again slow down call or email the requester to verify and don't click links. Hopefully you're more aware of how attackers can easily get some information about you to get access to passwords and worst case access to your customer's data. Now you should be able to spot social engineering attacks against you and your business. We hope these tips will help keep you your business and your customer's information secure. I'm Darlene. I'm Emma stay safe and stay healthy.