Spear Phishing Nets Criminals $54 Million
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 01/23/2016 10:36 AM
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Spear Phishing Nets Criminals $54 Million.
In a scheme targeting the company’s finance department, aircraft parts manufacturer FACC AG revealed this week that cybercriminals managed to steal a significant amount of money.
The typical scheme involves a bit of social engineering whereby the criminals send an email to the finance dept. of a company that appears to be from the company CEO. The email directs the accounting firm to send a large amount of money to the cybercriminals bank account, often a bank in China. In other cases, the criminals use malware to steal money from the company bank account, again as the result of a spear phishing scheme.
These types of scams, known as business email compromise (BEC) scams, have helped cyber crooks make a lot of money. Between October 2013 and August 2015, more than 7,000 victims had been recorded in the United States, with losses totaling nearly $750 million.
Data from international law enforcement agencies showed that BEC scams resulted in losses of more than 1.2 billion.
Source: SecurityWeek
In a scheme targeting the company’s finance department, aircraft parts manufacturer FACC AG revealed this week that cybercriminals managed to steal a significant amount of money.The typical scheme involves a bit of social engineering whereby the criminals send an email to the finance dept. of a company that appears to be from the company CEO. The email directs the accounting firm to send a large amount of money to the cybercriminals bank account, often a bank in China. In other cases, the criminals use malware to steal money from the company bank account, again as the result of a spear phishing scheme.
These types of scams, known as business email compromise (BEC) scams, have helped cyber crooks make a lot of money. Between October 2013 and August 2015, more than 7,000 victims had been recorded in the United States, with losses totaling nearly $750 million.
Data from international law enforcement agencies showed that BEC scams resulted in losses of more than 1.2 billion.
Source: SecurityWeek
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