{"id":4918,"date":"2020-03-10T20:19:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T20:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/questioning-the-boss-to-prevent-theft\/"},"modified":"2023-04-18T20:23:23","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T20:23:23","slug":"questioning-the-boss-to-prevent-theft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/insights\/questioning-the-boss-to-prevent-theft\/","title":{"rendered":"Questioning the Boss to Prevent Theft?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There has been a growing trend recently of cyber thieves committing high value thefts by spoofing the e-mail accounts of c-level executives to initiate unauthorized international wire transfers.&nbsp; These e-mails typically appear to come from the CEO or CIO, requesting that an employee perform a wire transfer.&nbsp; According to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ic3.gov\/media\/2015\/150122.aspx\">recent alert <\/a>by the FBI scams of this type (also referred to as Business E-mail Compromise or CEO Fraud) have accounted for at least $215 Million in theft within a 14 month period alone.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>There are many reasons why these efforts by cyber thieves have been so (unfortunately) successful, chief among those are:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Basic Psychology<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Employees from entry level through middle management are typically hesitant to question requests from upper level management.&nbsp; This hesitance to question the validity of a request is crucial to the success of this type of scam, as a simple \u201cI just wanted to verify that you requested this wire transfer\u201d would prevent the wire transfer from being sent.<\/p>\n<p><strong>E-mail Spoofing<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It is remarkably easy to spoof an e-mail (make an e-mail appear that it is coming from a different address than it is actually being sent from), but outside of technology related fields few individuals are aware of how easy this is to accomplish.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>LinkedIn <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>LinkedIn is extremely useful for networking and professional development.&nbsp; Unfortunately, the professional social media platform also makes it remarkable easy for Cyber Thieves to identity the names and titles to target with the fraudulent e-mails as well as the names and titles to masquerade as.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Corporate Branding<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Most businesses follow a consistent branding strategy, including standardized e-mail signature lines.&nbsp; This makes it relatively easy for cyber thieves to make an e-mail appear to be from the c-level executive beyond just the spoofed e-mail address.<\/p>\n<p>Out of the reasons noted above, only one contains a simple fix.&nbsp; By simply confirming any unusual money transfer request with the individual who made the request you can easily thwart an attempted theft for your business (and yes, that does mean questioning a request from your boss!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There has been a growing trend recently of cyber thieves committing high value thefts by spoofing the e-mail accounts of c-level executives to initiate unauthorized international wire transfers.  These e-mails typically appear to come from the CEO or CIO, requesting that an employee perform a wire transfer&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":6189,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,37],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-4918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-identity-fraud","category-security","tag-identity-fraud"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}