Summary: Changing the password blocks someone from signing in with the old password. However, they may still have an active session, a forwarding rule, access through a connected app, mailbox permissions, or a recovery method they added.

When someone gets into a business email account, changing the password should happen immediately. Once that is done, the account still needs a full check because other forms of access may remain.

During the time they had access, the attacker may have created a forwarding rule, approved a connected app, added a sign-in method, or granted access to another account. They may also have a browser or email app that is still signed in.

Email deserves particular care because it is connected to so many other services. Password-reset messages for accounting software, cloud storage, social media, and other business systems often arrive by email. Someone who can still read the inbox may be able to reach those accounts too.

That is why current recovery guidance from Microsoft, Google, and the Australian ASD Recovery Advise includes several checks beyond changing the password.

For years, the advice for spotting a scam email was simple: look for bad spelling and clumsy grammar. A real bank or supplier writes properly, the thinking went, so a message full of mistakes was probably fake. It was easy to teach, and for a long time it worked.

It doesn’t anymore. Scammers now use AI to write their emails, and AI writes cleanly. The typos and awkward phrasing that used to give phishing away are gone, and the messages landing in your team’s inbox read as well as anything from a real company. Worse, they can be written to sound like they came from someone you already know.

Article Summary: A passkey lets you sign in to an app or website using the same fingerprint, face, or PIN you use to unlock your phone or laptop, with no password to type. It’s built on a security standard called FIDO that can’t be phished, because the passkey only works on the real site and there’s no password to steal or reuse. Most major platforms and a growing list of business tools support passkeys, and Microsoft 365 includes them at no extra cost. For most businesses, it’s worth starting to roll them out, beginning with the most sensitive accounts.

Passwords are the weak point in most businesses.

People reuse them across accounts, write them on sticky notes, and type them into convincing fake login pages without realizing it.

Passkeys are the technology built to replace passwords, and they fix the parts that cause the most trouble.

A passkey lets you sign in with the same fingerprint, face scan, or PIN you already use to unlock your phone or laptop. There’s no password to type, so there’s nothing for an attacker to steal, guess, or trick out of you.

Article Summary: Email spoofing is when a scammer sends a message that appears to come from your domain, often to trick your clients or staff into paying a fake invoice or changing banking details. Three DNS records (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) prove that a message really came from you and tell receiving mail servers to reject the ones that didn’t. The catch is that DMARC only protects you once it’s set to “quarantine” or “reject,” and a lot of businesses leave it on “none,” which monitors but does not block.

Right now, with no special tools, someone could send an email that looks like it came from your company.

The From line would show your domain, your logo could be pasted into the message, and it could ask one of your clients to pay an invoice or update banking details. This is called email spoofing, and it is one of the most common ways fraud against your clients and suppliers begins.

There are three settings you can add to your domain that make this much harder to pull off.

They’re called SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

Most businesses have one or two of them set up and the third missing.

That’s usually all it takes to let a spoofed email through. This post explains what each one does, the setting most businesses get wrong, and how to check your own domain.

Article Summary: QR code scams, sometimes called quishing, hides a malicious web link inside a QR code. Because the link is buried in an image instead of written as text, it slips past the email filters that normally catch bad links, and scanning the code usually moves the victim onto a personal phone that sits outside the company’s security. Microsoft reported a 146% rise in QR code phishing during the first quarter of 2026.

QR codes are part of normal business now.

You scan them to see a menu, pay for parking, connect to Wi-Fi, or open a shared document.

 Attackers know that, and they have started hiding malicious links inside QR codes to get past the security tools that would normally catch a bad link in an email.

The technique has a name, quishing, and it works because a QR code is just an image.

Your email filter reads text, so a link encoded into a QR code can pass straight through. When you scan it, you usually do so on your phone, which sits outside most of the protection your work computer has.

This post covers what a QR code scam is, why it gets past your security, what the common ones look like, and the habits that protect your business.