In a more innocent age, a “spoof” was a prank or light-hearted parody. In today's world of high-tech connectivity, however, spoofing is no laughing matter. This deceitful practice of masquerading as a legitimate emailer or website can cause your employees to click their way into serious trouble for your business. That's why our Austin IT managed services experts at Gravity Systems want you know how you can keep spoofing from making a mockery of your organization.

 One obvious method for dealing with spoofed emails that contain dangerous malware, links or requests for sensitive information is to keep those emails from reaching your employees in the first place. A strong, up-to-date firewall can help by denying access to unauthorized IP addresses. Antivirus protection is another “gatekeeper” you can use to block many spoofing attempts. After all, spoof emails are usually a form of spam, so the better your IT system is at blocking spam, the fewer spoof emails your workers will encounter.

But no matter how brilliant your IT security is, the occasional spoofing attempt could still make its way to your employees' workstations. That's why you also need to educate your workforce on intelligent anti-spoofing practices such as:

• Paying attention to any oddness of tone, spelling/grammatical errors and other dead giveaways of an illegitimate source
• Checking the email's Internet Headers to see where it actually originated
• Never responding to a “virus notification” without letting an IT expert check it out first
• Setting their email application's junk-mail filters relatively high
• Never sending login information or other sensitive data via email

 Gravity Systems can help you strike back at spoofing. Our Gravity Anti-Spam service, business-class firewalls, security management and other Austin managed IT services can help you help your business play it smart. Contact us to learn more!

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