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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Uptick in Cyber Attacks on Small Businesses

Summary: Symantec's June 2012 intelligence report found that 36 percent of all targeted attacks, or 58 per day, were directed at businesses with 250 or fewer employees in the first six months of 2012, up from 18 percent at the end of December 2011. Krebs documented small-business heists in July 2012, including a southern Georgia fuel supplier where attackers attempted a $1.67 million transfer and then pushed through a $317,000 fraudulent payroll batch, and Nebraska-based Consolidated Concrete, which lost more than $100,000.

What you should know: Both victim companies banked online at small local institutions whose commercial account security was a username and password, in violation of FFIEC guidance effective January 2012 that called for transaction anomaly detection, dual authorization through different access devices, and out-of-band verification. The Georgia case began when a controller clicked a link in an image in an email disguised as a U.S. Postal Service parcel notice, which loaded the BlackHole exploit kit and installed the ZeuS Trojan.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
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