Waterloo Brewing loses $2.1 million in social engineering cyberattack

Stu Sjouwerman | Nov 22, 2019

waterloo-brewingWaterloo Brewing Ltd. says it has lost $2.1 million in what it calls a social engineering cyberattack. The Ontario brewery says the incident occurred in early November and involved the impersonation of a creditor employee and fraudulent wire transfer requests.

Waterloo Brewing says it initiated an analysis of all other transaction activity across all of its bank accounts, as well as a review of its internal systems and controls that included its computer networks, after becoming aware of the incident this week.

The brewer says it does not believe that its systems were breached, or that any personal information of its customers is at risk. The company has notified the appropriate authorities that include police, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada and the United States' Finance Crimes and Enforcement Network.

The company says it is working to recover the money, but made no assurance that it would be successful. Stepping your users through new-school security awareness training prevents disasters like this. Full Story:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/waterloo-brewing-cyberattack-1.5367658

Secure the Digital Workforce: Human + AI

KnowBe4 empowers the modern workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Trusted by more than 70,000 organizations worldwide, KnowBe4 is the pioneer of digital workforce security, securing both AI agents and humans. The KnowBe4 Platform provides attack simulation and training, collaboration security, and agent security powered by AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Defense Agents) and a proprietary Risk Score. The platform leverages 15 years of behavioral data to combat advanced threats including social engineering, prompt injection, and shadow AI. By securing humans and agents, KnowBe4 leads the industry in workforce trust and defense.