You may have seen it before, especially if you work in your company's finance department.
A brief, vague email from one of the company directors or shareholders asking if you are available to make a quick payment on their behalf.
But look a little closer - and it's from an email address you haven't seen that person use before, like a personal account or a slight misspelling of your company email address.
Unfortunately there's not much you can do to avoid receiving one of these targeted emails eventually, as efforts like filtering message content and blocking the sender's address means they'll just try a different address and message as they learn & adapt over time.
What you can do is implement a rule for your incoming emails that identifies messages that have not come from a sender within your company, and applies a small mark to identify it as an External email.
This little marker can be a significant change in helping your team avoid getting fooled into thinking they may have received a message from their colleague.
Of course, training your team and keeping them mindful of the latest tricks scammers are using, is one of the best security methods you can get - so make sure you are sharing these tips all the time.
If you've seen these sorts of emails before and have any questions about how you can further protect your own business, don't hesitate to get in touch with the team at ACS today.
ACS are experts at implementing a variety of security measures - including this very 'EXTERNAL' warning to inbound emails system-wide - and are constantly working on measures to make you more safe online.