Collaborate Disseminate
Money intended for the construction of a brand new high school was instead placed in a bank account controlled by scammers by officials of a North Carolina county. Cabarrus County in North Carolina, home to NASCAR races at the Charlotte speedway, was d… Continue reading $1.7 million still missing after North Carolina county hit by business email compromise scam
It seems that an annual jaunt through the success cybercriminals are having with business email compromise (BEC) and fleecing money from companies, organizations and governmental entities is a requirement. Last year we asked the question, “Are y… Continue reading Business Email Compromise Continues to Plague
If your boss sends you an email asking for a wire transfer, you should think twice. Hackers are using compromised corporate email accounts to steal more money than ever, according to new findings from a federal anti-money laundering watchdog. Business email compromise scams, in which scammers impersonate corporate executives to request money transfers, cost organizations an average of $301 million every month last year, according to a report released Tuesday by the Financial Crime Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a U.S. Department of Treasury unit. The federal anti-money laundering watchdog said it received roughly 14,000 suspicious activity reports related to BEC scams last year, compared to about 6,000 in 2016. The findings add more evidence to the notion that, despite more corporate training, stronger anti-phishing and anti-spoofing measures, and more security attention, thieves from around the world are continuing to siphon dollars from U.S. businesses of all sizes. “BEC continues to be […]
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Sometimes the most effective scam techniques are also the most mundane. Business email compromise attacks don’t involve advanced malware, and aren’t carried out by headline-grabbing nation-state hackers. BEC scams simply rely on personalized emails to dupe victims into transferring funds to someone who appears to be a co-worker, friend, or family member. But this fraud technique is taking a toll, depriving Americans of a vast sum of money each year. In 2018, the FBI’s cybercrime center received over 20,000 BEC complaints that accounted for estimated losses of $1.2 billion. Understanding the scale of the problem requires understanding how perpetrators scale their operations. The decade-long evolution of one Western African cybercriminal gang is a case in point. Email security firm Agari on Wednesday published research documenting the so-called Scattered Canary group’s rise from a lone individual to dozens of operatives specializing in various aspects of fraud. The group also has grown from peddling romance scams to targeting […]
The post West Africa’s Scattered Canary gang shows how cybercriminals supersize email scams appeared first on CyberScoop.
Continue reading West Africa’s Scattered Canary gang shows how cybercriminals supersize email scams
At Infosecurity Europe, Threatpost gets a behind-the-scenes look at the discovery of BEC cybergang Scattered Canary. Continue reading Podcast: Behind-the-Scenes Look at Scattered Canary BEC Cybergang
At Infosecurity Europe, researchers detailed a cybergang that grew from a one-man shop launching Craigslist scams to a full-on enterprise BEC group. Continue reading Newly-Identified BEC Cybergang Targets U.S. Enterprise Victims
The importance of reading the network tealeaves of a company’s network traffic to head off an attack. Continue reading How Decoding Network Traffic Can Save Your Data Bacon
Nigerian scam groups launched even more attacks in 2018 – and used more complex types of malware to reach more victims. Continue reading ThreatList: Nigerian Cybercrime Surged 54 Percent in 2018
Cloud misconfigurations, business email compromise (BEC) and intellectual property theft are all up in the Verizon DBIR 2019 from last year. Continue reading Verizon Data Breach Report: Espionage, C-Suite and Cloud Attacks on the Rise
In June of 2018, we blogged about a series of cases that the Department of Justice announced as “Operation: WireWire.” In particular, we wrote three pieces about the “South Florida Cases” where a Lebanese recruiter convinced people to set up shell comp… Continue reading The Next Miami Operation WireWire Case: Alfredo Veloso