Business Email Compromise Hits New High, New Targets

Date: 01/14/2019

It’s the ultimate payoff for a scammer: raking in a high-dollar payday with little effort or cybersecurity expertise. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what makes business email compromise scams, or BEC scams for short, so popular among criminals. By gaining access to an email account within a company, the potential for lucrative phishing scams is limitless.

One recent victim? Save the Children Foundation, a well-known non-profit organization that supports relief efforts for children all around the world. After scammers gained access to a staff member’s email address in 2017 and began sending invoices for solar panels to the proper department, the organization was cheated out of around one million.

BEC scams aren’t new. They used to be called “boss phishing” and “CEO phishing,” among other names. Now that criminals have figured out there are more people within a company with high-security access, the scam email can come from a variety of positions within the company.

The fact that BEC scams continue to work is alarming, though. In fact, the FBI reported that there were more than 300,000 cases of cybercrime in 2017, totaling over $1.42 billion in losses. BEC scams accounted for nearly half of those loses at $676 million. These scams saw a 137 percent increase in an eighteen-month period, and a report by WeLiveSecurity stated that social engineering scams like BEC and phishing emails were the third most commonly reported scam last year.

Unfortunately, social engineering scams still work, especially as scammers become more and more involved in the storyline. Those ludicrous old “Nigerian prince” email scams relied on social engineering, or getting the victim to hand over money in order to help someone in need and see a return on that money later. In the case of a BEC scam, the engineering is even simpler: “Bob from accounting” emailed an invoice—or so it appeared—and the recipient cut a check or transferred the funds, just like they do every single day. In other cases, the boss seems to have emailed a request for payroll records or W2 forms for everyone within the company; the assistant who received the email never thinks twice about following a logical request, and hands over the complete identities of everyone who works there.

In the case of business email compromise, the age-old advice isn’t easy to follow. Email scam recipients have always been told to ignore them. But how do you ignore a request from the CEO? How is a charity supposed to ignore an invoice for solar panels in a remote village when the organization’s job is literally to provide these things?

The first way for organizations to fight back against BEC scams is to institute iron-clad policies on submitting sensitive information, issuing payments and funds, changing account numbers or passwords, and other eyebrow-raising activities. The policy has to outline exactly which requests are to be questioned, as well as offer a layer of protection for an employee who requests verbal confirmation. Of course, preventing this kind of crime also starts with ensuring outsiders cannot gain access to a company’s email accounts, namely through strong, unique passwords that are force-changed on a regular basis and multi-factor authentication.

Contact the Identity Theft Resource Center for toll-free, no-cost assistance at (888) 400-5530. For on-the-go assistance, check out the free ID Theft Help App from ITRC.


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