According to a May 4, 2017 warning posted by the FBI, attempts at cyber wire fraud, using spoofed email to impersonate a C-level executive or trusted business associates, surged in the last seven months of 2016.
Cyber criminals tried to steal $5.3 billion through schemes what the FBI calls “business email compromise” – also known as CEO fraud. This according to a new report at the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. The new figure is up sharply from previous FBI reports which showed cyber scammers attempted to steal $3.1 billion from October 2013 through May 2016.
The number of business-email compromise cases, in which cyber criminals request wire transfers in emails that look like they are from senior corporate executives or business suppliers who regularly request payments, almost doubled from May to December of last year. Rising to 40,203 from 22,143 the FBI reported.
Robert Holmes, a Proofpoint Inc. business email compromise researcher, estimates that the incidents known to the FBI represent just 20% of the actual attacks and that total loses could be as much as double the reported figures.
The first line of defense is to understand that your employees are the weakest link in your security network. Read what Kenneth Montgomery of Boston Fed recently shared about employees enabling cybercrime: http://www.csoonline.com/article/3193706/data-breach/human-weakness-enabling-financial-cybercrime.html.
With the right training, employees can be taught what a fraudulent email looks like. But to change human behavior first requires admitting there is an issue. Then it takes a systematic approach with a proven adult learning model. Let me know if you’d like to know how we help protect clients from become another headline and embarrassment.