Don’t Blame the I.T. Department

“Hi, how can I help you,” asked my colleague when I answered his unexpected phone call.

“Hi there, what do you mean?,” I replied

“You sent me an email asking for help,” he said

“Ah, no I didn’t. What are you referring to?,” I asked

“An email came in. Looks like one of your domains. Sounds a little like you. Wait. The sender NAME is your email address, the actual ‘sent from’ email address is some bogus gmail.”

 

Then Russell uttered those words that put fear into the hearts of men and women everywhere: You may have been hacked. Better get onto it.”

 

Managing Your Digital Reputation 

One of the most complained about departments in most organisations seems to be the I.T Department.

 

In large corporations, not for profits and medium business owners you’ve got your IT Department. Ahhh, I remember the days where you could ring them on the internal line and ask for help, or lodge a ticket, and invariably there’d be some sort of hiccup like:

• my computer is slow
• the connection is slow
• there’s not enough training on this
• I can’t access this site and we need it for the services we deliver
• I’ve forgotten my password or username
• I can’t upload my own programs to it

 

The IT Department Guy (usually) would respond with questions like,

• have you turned it on and off?
• have you done a control, alt, delete,
• have you used it on any open wifi networks,
• what other programs have you got open at the same time

and the IT department reactions behind the scenes are pretty funny. Did you know they have a saying when they think it’s the person; not the machine. Yep, they do. They call it a PICNIC error:

Problem In Chair Not In Computer

 

 

All jokes and reminiscing aside. I have a WHOLE new appreciation for that former IT Department now as a business owner celebrating 10 years being in charge of the whole thing for our company! We outsource to trusted suppliers where we need to and manage the day to day, internally, which means the buck stops with us.

I’ve been learning extensively in the past few years and it still blows my mind that there are people out there who use their power for evil. The playing field has become a lot more dangerous and nasty.

 

Here are my tips on what YOU can do as an employee, employer and business owner to protect your organisational and professional reputations:

Email Addresses

• ensure your email address is not publically visible on the organisation website (mine was because I wanted to be accessible, and yet it only takes one person who is ill-intentioned to wreak havoc and chew up your time)
• WordPress Website? Install a plugin similar to “Obfuscate Emails”, so that hyperlinked emails cannot be scraped from the view source code on the website
• Consider whether you add your direct email in the social media contact pages OR if you default to their systems internal messaging systems (Note. LinkedIn no longer exports Profile contact email addresses, so that’s a great safeguard)

Images | Photos

• put your name ACROSS your BIO Image to minimise the risk of people masquerading as you
• save each and every image you take or download of you or your content, with your domain address in the filename.

 

Passwords & Logins

• No brainer, change them regularly
• Use a minimum of 10 letters – alpha, numeric and symbol
• and use a password vault like LastPass, 1Password by Agile or iCloud

 

CRMs and Email Integrations

Oh, there are heaps of them. Think: Infusionsoft, Ontraport, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit/Seva and so on.

If your email has been compromised through a form of masquerading – someone pretending to be you, like they did with me, and you’re using that SAME email address to communicate through pre-scheduled, automated sequence, you need to be pretty quick to change it!

 

Why? If your email is reported as SPAM:

• it will skip your recipient’s inbox and go straight to junk mail
• it will impact your business lead generation and nurture strategies
• it may lead to unsubscribes
• you’ll need to be intentional and get busy boosting trust again through genuine, regular connection.

 

So the upshot of that recent incident?

Because my colleague picked up the phone to clarify, I was alert but not alarmed. We took actions to safeguard our customers, made sure there’d been no brute force attacks on our websites, all those passwords were changed, and the email sequencing outbound sender email replaced with a new one.

And we confirmed NO outbound emails from the masquerading address emanated from our email hosting system.

Thank goodness!

 

 

 

 

Shall we all just pause for a moment, grateful our skills are increasing as we take responsibility for our online reputations and offer up a big, sincere thanks to every I.T. Department we may have ever moaned about.

They’re worth their weight in gold!

 

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