Phishing is one of the most common cybercrimes businesses face. According to the FBI IC3 2025 report, phishing and spoofing was the most reported crime type in 2025, with 191,561 complaints and $215.8 million in reported losses. Business email compromise, a closely related impersonation scam, accounted for another $3.046 billion in reported losses.
All it takes is an employee falling for a deceptive email, logging in to a fake website, or downloading a malicious file to give an attacker a foothold in your systems. So, how can you protect your business from phishing?
Effective phishing protection for businesses relies on a layered plan that covers email, endpoints, remote access tools, employee training, and recovery plans. With that in mind, let’s look at phishing protection, what a strong strategy looks like, and how to protect your business.
How phishing attacks target businesses today
Modern phishing attacks can take a few different forms, so it’s important to know what to watch out for. Phishing scams typically aim to steal login information or deploy malware, and often rely on social engineering to trick victims into doing either.
Phishing attacks can include:
Credential phishing, wherein the attacker impersonates a supervisor, colleague, or IT staff and sends targets a link to a fake login page. The goal of this attack is to steal the victim’s username and password, which can be especially damaging if they use the same credentials on multiple websites.
Business email compromise, where an attacker impersonates an executive or vendor, using either a lookalike email address or a real account they have already compromised. These attacks aim to redirect payments or steal data.
Malicious links and attachments that install malware when the victim opens them.
Text and chat lures through SMS, Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, and similar platforms. These can use the same malicious links and fake login pages but can be trickier to spot, since the short links used on those tools are harder to inspect.
Voice phishing with spoofed caller ID, another impersonation scam. This often leads to an attacker asking an employee to install a remote access tool, which they can use to access the victim’s computer and the company network.
AI-written lures can also make phishing scams more effective by removing spelling and grammar mistakes employees are trained to spot, making them more convincing.
Why one layer of phishing protection falls short
Anti-phishing for business security isn’t as simple as adding one tool and calling it a day. Effective protection needs layers, with multiple barriers to defend against different tricks and attacks.
Email filters help catch phishing emails, but lures can also arrive through text, chat, or phone calls.
Similarly, employee training can reduce click rates, but an employee may still fall for a well-crafted message, especially now that AI makes phishing harder to spot. If a phishing scam infects a computer with malware or gives an attacker remote access, companies will need additional tools to mitigate and address the damage.
The goal is to create layered security, so one mistake doesn’t lead to a breach. Each layer should cover what the previous one missed, leaving attackers fewer weaknesses to exploit.
How to protect your business from phishing
With that said, what security layers do businesses need? Phishing protection should include:
1. Authenticate and filter emails before they reach inboxes
Many phishing attempts begin with a deceptive email, so detecting and stopping them early creates a strong cybersecurity foundation. Be sure to set up authentication methods, such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), to check and verify emails.
DMARC checks incoming email against the sending domain’s published rules, so spoofed messages can be quarantined or rejected. Set DMARC to “reject” for the email you send as well, which makes it much harder for attackers to impersonate your domain. The CISA joint phishing guidance recommends both settings. You can also block high-risk file types and known malicious domains at the email gateway, making it harder for certain phishing attacks to get through.
2. Use phishing-resistant MFA for every business account
Passwords are a good start for protecting accounts, but additional user verification is important. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) helps ensure a stolen password alone isn’t enough to log in by requiring users to confirm their identity through a secondary method.
Keep in mind that not all MFA tools work equally well. While FIDO or PKI-based authentication can help resist phishing attempts, MFA tools that rely on SMS, voice codes, and push approvals without number matching are easier to trick. If you can’t roll out phishing-resistant MFA everywhere at once, CISA recommends starting with administrator and other privileged accounts and turning on number matching for push-based MFA.
3. Protect endpoints so one click does not become a compromise
Consider how important each endpoint is. A phishing link can arrive through work email, personal email, a text, or a chat app, but it always opens on a device. Email filters never see a link sent to a personal account or by text, so the endpoint is often the last point where a click can be stopped.
Endpoint protection should include antivirus protection to stop malware, blocking known malicious sites, automatic software updates to keep security patches current, restricting high-risk file types like .exe and .scr, and limiting who has administrative rights. CISA’s phishing guidance includes each of these controls.
4. Control which remote access tools can run on company devices
Help desk impersonation phishing scams aim to trick users into installing remote access software, which an attacker can use to take control of the device. This can be particularly tricky to catch, since many businesses use remote access tools for remote work and troubleshooting, so they can’t ban all remote access.
The trick is to use a defined list of remote access tools and block everything else, so employees don’t get tricked into using an unapproved tool. At the same time, verification is vital; if employees receive a request to install a remote access tool, even if it’s allegedly from IT, they should use a known internal channel to confirm the request is legitimate.
5. Train employees and make reporting easy
Employee training is one of the most important security layers. Employees should know how to prevent phishing and have a clear way to report attempts, reducing the chances they fall for one.
Provide phishing awareness training at least once a year, which is CISA’s baseline for small and midsize businesses, along with shorter refreshers and phishing simulation tests in between. These tests should include email, text, chat, and phone scenarios so employees are trained on all fronts.
If employees spot a scam, they should be able to report it quickly to the right people. They should also know the verification rules for confirming payment changes and credential requests, including calling back on known numbers to confirm any requests.
With this training, alongside the layers of security tools and features, businesses can better protect themselves from phishing.
What to do when an employee clicks a phishing link
If an employee gets fooled by a phishing scam, there’s no need to panic. These steps, based on the incident response guidance in CISA’s phishing guide, help you stop the attack, limit the damage, and recover as quickly as possible:
Isolate the device from the network so that the malware can’t spread to other connected devices.
End any active sessions, then reset the affected account's password and check multi-factor authentication settings to make sure they weren’t changed.
Check account access and activity to see what the compromised account did. Be sure to check for any new mailbox forwarding rules and recent logins.
Scan the device and remove any malware. If any further analysis is required, escalate it to specialists.
Check other inboxes for the same message, remove them if needed, and block the sender or domain.
Confirm the device and account are clean; if so, restore normal operations.
Report the incident to the FBI's IC3 and CISA (if appropriate), then update training and controls based on what happened.
How Splashtop Shield for Business protects endpoints from phishing
Splashtop is known for its remote access, remote support, and endpoint management software. Splashtop Shield for Business adds endpoint protection to that toolkit, covering the layer where a phishing click either stops or becomes a compromise.
Splashtop Shield for Business is available as an add-on to Splashtop business products with unattended access, and it protects Windows and macOS computers. Its AI-assisted threat detection identifies and blocks phishing sites, malware, and unauthorized remote access tools.
1. Block phishing and scam sites before they load
Splashtop Shield helps prevent phishing by identifying and blocking known phishing sites before they load, so employees can’t enter credentials or download malware. It can also detect new and emerging scam sites.
When Splashtop Shield blocks a threat, it alerts the IT team so they stay aware. At the same time, admins can create a list of trusted websites to avoid false positives.
2. Stop unauthorized remote access tools
Many businesses rely on remote access tools so employees can work from anywhere and IT can support them wherever they are. However, phishing scams often try to get employees to install an unauthorized remote access tool so the attacker can control their device.
Splashtop Shield detects and blocks attempts to install unauthorized remote access tools and immediately alerts IT teams. This helps stop help desk impersonation scams at the point where attackers try to take control of the device, while admins can still approve the remote access tools their teams use.
3. Stop malware delivered through phishing
Splashtop Shield also includes real-time anti-malware protection that detects and blocks malware. It can scan devices, downloaded files, and removable media for malicious files, and it automatically quarantines most threats. This AI-assisted threat detection helps keep endpoints secure, even if an employee clicks a malicious link.
4. See and respond to blocked threats from one console
Splashtop Shield also fits into the workflow IT teams already use. Threat alerts appear in the Splashtop console, right next to the endpoint data IT teams already check, with a link to triage each one.
Additionally, IT teams can use Splashtop Remote Access, Splashtop Remote Support, or Splashtop AEM to move directly from an alert to a remote session to investigate and address it. For later review, activity history covers the last 90 days, and logs cover 12 months of security events with CSV export.
Admins can lock protection policies so users can’t change them, and require a password to uninstall the agent, so protection stays on even if someone on the device tries to turn it off.
Add endpoint protection to your phishing defense with Splashtop Shield for Business
Phishing attacks take several forms and arrive through many channels, including email, text, chat apps, and phone calls. Layered protection gives each attack more than one place to be stopped.
With Splashtop Shield for Business, IT teams can block phishing sites and unauthorized remote access tools on Windows and macOS computers, and see alerts directly in the Splashtop console. That adds protection at the endpoint, right where a phishing click happens.
Want to protect your devices from phishing, malware, and more? Add Splashtop Shield for Business to your Splashtop subscription today.
