Security Awareness Training Blog

CEO Fraud Blog

News about the latest CEO fraud attacks. See how the bad guys actually do this and how much money companies lose to this type of scam.

The RopeMaker Exploit Can CHANGE An Already Delivered Email

Our friends at Mimecast are warning against something scary! This is a sobering example of why scanners and filters will always be behind in the security arms race... They wrote: "Most ...
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CEO Fraud Attacks Were Far More Lucrative than Ransomware over the Past 3 Years

Cisco's midyear report released this week showed that CEO Fraud netted cybercrime five times more money than ransomware over the last three years. The surprising highlight of Cisco's ...
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FBI: "Extortion And CEO Fraud Are The Top Online Fraud Complaints"

And victims aren't reporting ransomware attacks... Online extortion, tech support scams and phishing attacks that spoof the boss (CEO Fraud) were among the most damaging and expensive ...
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Southern Oregon University Lost $1.9 Million Due To CEO Fraud

Mail Tribune reported that Southern Oregon University is just the latest victim of CEO fraud (which the FBI calls Business Email Compromise or BEC) after hackers tricked university ...
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[ALERT] FBI: "CEO Fraud Is Now 5.3 Billion Email Scam"

There is no better budget ammo for new-school security awareness training than this. Attempts at cyber wire fraud, using spoofed email to impersonate a C-level executive or trusted ...
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Who Were The Two Big US Tech Companies That Lost $100 Million In CEO Fraud?

4/28/2017 UPDATE: Facebook and Google confirmed as victims of $100M phishing scam. Story at The Verge. In an update on an earlier post of April 2016, more detail came known about this ...
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Campbell County Health Falls Victim To W-2 CEO Fraud

And another one.  You have to watch it, the tax scam season is back in full swing.  Full W-2 information including SSN# for more than 1,400 employees who worked over the past year at ...
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Sedgwick County Loses $566,000 Due To CEO Fraud

WICHITA, Kansas - A Georgia man has been arrested on federal charges he carried out an e-mail spoofing scheme that cost Sedgwick County $566,000.  George S. James, 48, Brookhaven, Ga., is ...
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Why You Should Be Afraid of CEO Fraud [INFOGRAPHIC]

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City Of El Paso Victim Of 3 Million Dollar Phishing Scam

During a news conference Wednesday afternoon, city officials revealed that cybercriminals pretending to be a vendor scammed the city's Accounts Receivable Department out of about $3 ...
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82% of Email Servers are Misconfigured, Allowing Domain Spoofing

We reviewed thousands of domains that have been through our domain spoof test and analyzed more than 10,000 email servers. We found that 82% of these are misconfigured. 
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AI-powered ransomware is coming, and it's going to be terrifying

Business Insider started an article with the following: "Imagine you've got a meeting with a client, and shortly before you leave, they send you over a confirmation and a map with ...
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Investment fund loses $6 million in CEO Fraud and shuts down

CNBC reported some pretty stunning breaking news. I cannot come up with a better case for new-school security awareness training for employees in accounting and HR. A lawsuit filed on ...
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Seagate Sued By Own Employees For CEO Fraud Attack

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate was sued by its own employees as the result of a successful CEO fraud attack where all the personal information of 10,000 existing and former employees ...
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Having some Phun With Phishers - CEO Fraud Blow-By-Blow

For the last 9 years I have been a board member of the public/private  Clearwater Downtown Partnership.  And as many public organizations, all the board member information is freely ...
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Cyberheist Nets 44 Million In Single CEO Fraud Attack

Earlier in August, one of the world's largest cable manufacturers Leoni AG publicly confessed that it had fallen victim to a classic CEO Fraud attack that has cost the company a whopping ...
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Scam Of The Week: FBI Warns Against Data Breach Extortion

The number of data breaches keeps going up. Last week it was more than 1,000 Wendy's where credit card records got ripped off. Fraudsters quickly use the news release of a high-profile ...
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Wow, the bad guys are moving fast with CEO Fraud!

KnowBe4 is expanding fast, we now have 120 employees and we just hired a new controller late May to help out our very busy CFO. Part of the KnowBe4 onboarding is getting through our ...
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Top website domains are vulnerable to email spoofing

Don’t be surprised if you see spam coming from the top websites in the world. Lax security standards are allowing anyone to "spoof" emails from some of the most-visited domains, according ...
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FBI: Business e-mail scam losses top $3 billion, a 1,300% increase in since Jan.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) this week said the scourge it calls the Business Email Compromise continues to rack-up victims and money – over $3 billion in losses so ...
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