Whether you work in IT consulting and managed IT solutions in Melbourne, Mumbai, or Montpelier, you’re bound to learn a few things if you’ve been in the business a while. One: humans remain the biggest security vulnerability in any organization. Two: nobody reads the policy documents.
Remember, cybersecurity isn’t about technology alone. It’s also about knowing what’s out there. So here are five threats every team should be aware of—not just in theory, but to prevent them from happening to you.
- Phishing Emails
Still number one, and still highly effective. The format shifts slightly each year—sometimes a fake invoice, sometimes a Dropbox link, sometimes a message from a “senior executive” in urgent need of discretion—but the goal is always the same. Click. Download. Give something away.
We’ve seen clients fooled by emails that mirrored their own branding. We’ve seen entire inboxes forwarded to attackers for weeks without anyone noticing. Teach staff to stop and look closely. Hover over links. Question urgency. And maybe stop calling every single internal request “urgent” while you’re at it—it dulls the senses.
- Fake Login Pages
A phishing email is only half the trick. The other half is the website it leads to. A fake Microsoft 365 login page. A cloned banking portal. It looks right—logo in place, colors spot on—but the address is slightly off. One character. One dot.
Staff log in, nothing happens, they shrug and move on. Meanwhile, the attacker now has access to your email, files, and whatever other systems use the same credentials. Which, if we’re being honest, is often all of them.
Multi-factor authentication helps. But if you’re using MFA and your users are auto-approving everything that pops up, you may as well not bother.
- Ransomware
Still the brute-force king of cybercrime. One wrong click, and the entire network locks up tighter than a vault. Files encrypted. Systems frozen. A helpful message appears with instructions to “recover your data”. For a price.
Backups matter, yes. But they need to be off site or offline, regularly tested, and not connected to the same network that’s been compromised. We’ve seen clients faithfully back up their data every night—straight to a drive that gets encrypted the moment ransomware hits.
It’s not paranoia. It’s planning.
- SMS and Voice Phishing (Smishing and Vishing)
Not everyone reads their email. So attackers try texts and calls instead. A delivery alert. A bank fraud warning. A voicemail pretending to be IT support, asking for remote access to your device.
The messages are short, and often riddled with just enough urgency to push someone into acting without thinking. And because they target mobile devices, they often bypass traditional security tools entirely.
Just remember, nobody tax authority is texting you about a warrant, and no courier needs your credit card number to redeliver a parcel. If it smells wrong, it probably is.
- Unauthorized Tools and Shadow IT
Your team means well. They just wanted a quicker way to collaborate, or share files, or schedule meetings. So they sign up for that slick-looking app or cloud platform, no IT involvement whatsoever. It works. Until it doesn’t.
These tools often bypass company security policies. They store sensitive data in unknown locations. And when someone leaves the company, they take their unauthorized accounts with them.
It’s not about locking everything down. It’s about giving staff what they need before they go looking for alternatives. That means having conversations, not just control measures.
The tools we use are only as secure as the people using them. That’s not an insult—it’s just reality. Good security isn’t about locking up the system and throwing away the key. It’s about making smart choices, early enough to matter, and giving your team just enough suspicion to slow down when something feels off.
Threats aren’t going away. But the damage they cause? That’s still optional.
