Spoofing the Boss Turns Thieves a Tidy Profit
Summary: An employee at a northeast Ohio manufacturer nearly wired $315,000 to China after receiving an email that appeared to come from her traveling boss, but the bank clawed the funds back before processing. The FBI warned in January 2015 that cyber thieves stole nearly $215 million from businesses over the previous 14 months through business email compromise scams, and in February The Scoular Co. of Omaha lost $17.2 million wired in installments to a bank in China.
What's compelling: The fraudsters registered a look-alike domain through Vistaprint the same morning as the wire request, and the victim's bank had virtually no visibility into the channel where the request arrived - a $17.2 million loss at an 800-employee company shows how far a single convincing email can travel.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Phishing & Social Engineering
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