Business Email Compromise Attacks Are Not Always Sophisticated

Business email compromise (BEC) attacks are relentlessly attacking businesses with no let-up in sight.  BEC attacks have traditionally used CEOs and CFOs as their foils, pretending to be them and getting people to wire money to the hackers.

The oil and gas industry was targeted by a single individual using old generic malware readily available online and scraping company’s web sites for email addresses.  It doesn’t always require a sophisticated plan of attack,

One guy in his 20s targeting 4,000 organizations using a few fake Yahoo email addresses was all it took in this case. Over a few months he successfully attacked a few large companies, getting away with a lot of money.

According to Cisco’s midyear cybersecurity report, over the last 3 years, businesses lost over $5 billion.  Likely, this number is low because a lot of companies don’t want to let customers know that they were hacked – possibly by a lone hacker using obsolete software and no infrastructure to support him.

One industry that is being hammered is the real estate industry.  For the most part, industry members don’t like talking about it, but every now and then we do hear stories.  One group that is often targeted is real estate agents.  These people are often one person organizations with limited technical support and, in many cases, not technically sophisticated.  And, they act as trusted intermediaries between all the parties to the transaction.  My recommendation to real estate agents is to not get in the middle of the finances and make that clear to the parties.  Otherwise they will potentially wind up in the middle of a lawsuit just for trying to help out.

In one example, a real estate agent got an email from a person claiming to be looking for a house.  The scammer then sent a link in another email to the agent, claiming that the link was a bank mortgage pre-approval letter.  In fact, it was an attempt to steal the agent’s email password.  If successful the attacker, could then, silently, read all of the agent’s emails.

As soon as the hacker sees an exchange with information about wiring funds, they can inject their own emails changing those instructions and wiring money to them.

We have seen multiple cases where the money lost was well over a hundred thousand dollars in each case.  For a company, with the right kind of insurance, while this loss is a pain, but it is manageable.  We know of one local company that lost close to $150,000 because they did not have the right insurance coverage.

For homeowners who are either buying or selling a house, they have no insurance and the real estate agent or title company likely has zero liability for giving you back the money.  It is possible that the might have insurance coverage, but it depends a lot on exactly how the attack worked.

If the company does not have the right kind of insurance and they don’t have the funds to reimburse the buyer or seller, that company will likely face a lawsuit and may go out of business.  For real estate agents, that could be a judgement against them and bankruptcy.

We always tell people that they need to have the right kind of cyber insurance and the Cisco report gives 5 billion reasons why.

It is important to understand exactly what insurance coverage you do have and we strongly recommend that our customers seek out the advice of a cyber insurance knowledgeable insurance agent before purchasing cyber risk insurance.  Unfortunately, many agents who sell cyber insurance do not have the training needed to take care of the customer.  They are not bad people, just people who need more training before selling an insurance product that can be very complicated.

Information for this post came from Dark Reading.

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