Brian Krebs has an excellent example of a recent cyberheist. Read it and weep!
The $180,000 robbery took the building security and maintenance system installer Primary Systems Inc. by complete surprise. More than two-dozen people helped to steal funds from the companys coffers in an overnight heist on May 2012, but none of the perpetrators were ever caught on video. Rather, a single virus-laden email that an employee clicked on let the attackers open a digital backdoor, exposing security weaknesses that unfortunately persist between many banks and their corporate customers.
The St. Louis, Missouri-based firm first learned that things werent quite right on Wednesday, May 30, 2012, when the companys payroll manager logged into her account at the local bank and discovered that an oversized payroll batch for approximately $180,000 had been sent through late Tuesday evening.
The money had been pushed out of Primary Systems bank accounts in amounts between $5,000 and $9,000 to 26 individuals throughout the United States who had no prior interaction with the firm, and who had been added to the firms payroll that very same day. The 26 were money mules, willing or unwitting participants who are hired through work-at-home job schemes to help cyber thieves move money abroad. Most of the mules hired in this attack were instructed to send the companys funds to recipients in Ukraine.
The payroll manager contacted me at 8:00 a.m. that day to ask if Id authorized the payroll batch, and I said no, it must have been a bank error, said Jim Faber, Primary Systems chief financial officer. I called the bank and said they said no, they did not make an error. That was a helluva wake-up call. Here is the whole blog post
Reason for the cyberheist? Primary Systems employees failed to be wary of virus-laden email attachments, and relied too heavily on its firewalls and antivirus software to block attacks. In short they did not get sufficient security awareness training.
The $180,000 robbery took the building security and maintenance system installer Primary Systems Inc. by complete surprise. More than two-dozen people helped to steal funds from the companys coffers in an overnight heist on May 2012, but none of the perpetrators were ever caught on video. Rather, a single virus-laden email that an employee clicked on let the attackers open a digital backdoor, exposing security weaknesses that unfortunately persist between many banks and their corporate customers.
The St. Louis, Missouri-based firm first learned that things werent quite right on Wednesday, May 30, 2012, when the companys payroll manager logged into her account at the local bank and discovered that an oversized payroll batch for approximately $180,000 had been sent through late Tuesday evening.
The money had been pushed out of Primary Systems bank accounts in amounts between $5,000 and $9,000 to 26 individuals throughout the United States who had no prior interaction with the firm, and who had been added to the firms payroll that very same day. The 26 were money mules, willing or unwitting participants who are hired through work-at-home job schemes to help cyber thieves move money abroad. Most of the mules hired in this attack were instructed to send the companys funds to recipients in Ukraine.
The payroll manager contacted me at 8:00 a.m. that day to ask if Id authorized the payroll batch, and I said no, it must have been a bank error, said Jim Faber, Primary Systems chief financial officer. I called the bank and said they said no, they did not make an error. That was a helluva wake-up call. Here is the whole blog post
Reason for the cyberheist? Primary Systems employees failed to be wary of virus-laden email attachments, and relied too heavily on its firewalls and antivirus software to block attacks. In short they did not get sufficient security awareness training.
