Hackers Maliciously Re-Route Wire Transfers For Personal Gain

Business email fraud is the act of breaching corporate email accounts that contain sensitive information, and then falsifying and forging counterfeit emails from that account for malicious use.

The FBI has stated that over $1 billion has been lost due to such activity, and that recently, 25 Dallas-based companies had been specifically targeted. The first way this specific scheme can take is place when a hacker (or hacker ring) uploads malware on to a corporate computer through a variety of nefarious scams, gaining access to high-level executive email accounts which send unsecured wire transfers. Once the criminal has gained access to the account, they then have control of altering and managing the wire transfers, and fraudulently exposing the wire transfers for personal gain.

The second method involves the hackers setting up similar domains with attached email accounts, intercepting recipient email addresses that the official corporate account communicates with, and then sending imitation messages to those recipients. The messages, claimed to be sent from a verified corporate account, as the domains appear to be nearly identical, insist that the wire transfers be diverted to new bank accounts.

The third technique involves the hacker intercepting an email containing an invoice or check, creating a fake business and bank account, and then composing a new message to be sent at a later time informing the recipient that the bank routing numbers have changed. Make sure to verify with the company by verified phone number that routing and account numbers have in fact been changed. Not following this practice could result in massive losses.

Business email fraud primarily has been affecting small to medium size businesses, as of late, because of their lack of security. Both of these hacktivist rackets expose businesses that feel they don’t have the proper funding to maintain a secure environment. But with a little research and a small fee, millions of dollars could be saved.

As  cyber breaches becomes more and more popular, the demand for digital security has increased exponentially. Not only are secure email solutions easy to find, but they’ve become quite affordable, as providers have realized that the traditional enterprise target market is now just one of many. Sure, large corporations still need to protect their information, but so do small businesses, and so do many individuals.

Secure email doesn’t have to be a convoluted process, and in this day and age, can be quite simple.

Email has become a targeted weakness of many small businesses because cyber-criminals understand that unless a message has been sent encrypted, it’s vulnerable to attack. A secure email solution not only prevents the message itself from being corrupted, but it also promotes a better protected login and account management process.

Small to medium size businesses may feel that they’re more vulnerable to attack, but in reality, they’re just as capable of supplying their own digital security system (at a reasonable price) as their enterprise-level competitors. Take some time to research and trial the various secure email solutions on the market, and choose the one that best suits your business’ needs.

Peter J. Schaub

NeoCertified – President & CEO