
Cy-BOO!-Security Awareness Month Competition Winning Entries
Selina CoenExplore the chilling tale that won our Cy-BOO! Security Awareness Month Competition, revealing the eerie truths of cybersecurity in a hair-raising narrative.
For every global tragedy, there is a rise in scams and phishing attacks. The Coronavirus pandemic has forced many enterprise companies to move internal staff to a work-from-home workforce, which opens the business to much higher cybersecurity risk. Users with their own devices, Internet connectivity, and Wi-Fi connections do not have the enterprise-level cyber-defenses. Hackers know that home users are much more vulnerable to attacks, and they’ve taken advantage by targeting financial people with fake invoices, phishing emails, and social engineering.
Phishers Targeting Financial People
In a time when the world is sensitive to the COVID-10 pandemic, it’s important for financial people to stay aware of the increase in phishing and social engineering. Hackers use legitimate looking invoices and emails to trick financial people into sending money to the attacker’s account. Most personal email accounts don’t have the phishing detection and prevention compared to an enterprise email server, and attackers will search for a user’s personal email and use it to attempt a data breach.
Using fake invoices isn’t anything new in the cybersecurity world. Attackers will generate an official-looking invoice in an attempt to trick a financial staff member into sending them money. The emails look like they come from official senders, and the invoices are crafted in a way that makes them look legitimate. It takes a trained, educated eye to catch the warning signs. According to the FBI, business email compromise (BEC) is a $3 billion industry. In some scenarios, an attacker pretends to be an executive, accountant, or an attorney to intimidate the targeted user into acting quickly without questioning the validity of the request.
Not every attack is meant for immediate financial gain. Some attackers want data to then sell on darknet markets. The risk of being caught is lower, but the value of a large data breach can bring in millions. In many of these attacks, a phishing email is sent to the targeted user tricking them into clicking a link that brings the user to a web page. The web page looks like an official business page, and the attacker tricks the user into authenticating. Instead of authenticating, the user sends network credentials to the attacker who can now access the network as an official account. With legitimate credentials, the attacker can browse the network without detection. It can take sometimes months for administrators to detect this type of data breach.
Here are some examples of phishing emails that threaten your business:
Hold on, should I be suspicious of that email from my boss? Yes, always think twice before you pay that invoice or transfer funds!
What Organizations Can Do to Protect Data during COVID
While administrators have less control of employee computer activity at home, there are some ways to reduce risk of a successful BEC attack. User training is an option, and it can be done remotely. However, even with user training employees can make mistakes especially with the spike of phishing and social engineering during the pandemic. A solution like SpamTitan will block phishing emails before they reach your network. Here are some other ways to reduce risk:
The above list is not exhaustive. Due to the sophisticated nature of advanced persistent threats via email, SpamTitan includes a sandboxing feature and anti-spoofing layers. SpamTitan sandboxing protects against breaches and data loss from zero-day threats and sophisticated email attacks by providing a powerful environment to run in-depth, sophisticated analysis of unknown or suspicious programs and files. SpamTitan sandboxing will protect against malware, spear-phishing, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and malicious URLs, offering insight into new threats and helping mitigate risks.
Make life easier for your IT department and safer for all the staff in your organization. See immediate results for spam and BEC attack blocking without tying up IT resources with SpamTitan Cloud.
Explore the chilling tale that won our Cy-BOO! Security Awareness Month Competition, revealing the eerie truths of cybersecurity in a hair-raising narrative.
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