New data compiled by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) shows that illegal transactions linked to business email compromise (BEC)—aka CEO Fraud— scams averaged $300 million per month last year. The figure is based on suspicious activity reports (SARs) received by FinCEN. In 2018, the organization received close to 14,000 filings.
The report underscores that BEC scams are becoming more common and more costly, since the number of SARs related to BEC scams totaled less than 6,000 in 2016, when the total monthly sum of illegal transactions averaged $110 million. In 2017, 11,000 SARs accounted for $241 million worth of suspicious transfers each month. Continued at Bleepingcomputer
The lesson is very clear here: make SURE high-risk employees are trained against CEO Fraud.
Did you know that 60% of BEC attacks do not include a malicious link or attachment?
When crafted well, most users are likely to fall victim to a highly targeted phishing attack.
Many of your users think they are safe as long as they don't click on something in an email, but through the use of a social engineering tactic called “pretexting”, the bad guys establish trust with your key users by pretending to be someone they know in order to carry out a damaging attack.
These types of attacks usually do not have links or attachments and simply trick your users into replying to the email and performing actions that lead to monetary or data loss for your organization.
KnowBe4’s new Phishing Reply Test (PRT) is a complimentary IT security tool that makes it easy for you to check to see if key users in your organization will reply to a highly targeted phishing attack. PRT will give you quick insights into how many users will take the bait so you can take action to train your users and better protect your organization from these fraudulent attacks!
Here's how the Phishing Reply Test works:
Immediately start your test with your choice of three phishing email reply scenarios
Spoof a Sender’s name and email address your users know and trust
Phishes for user replies and returns the results to you within minutes
Get a PDF emailed to you within 24 hours with the percentage of users that replied
Identify how many users take the bait and reply before the bad guys do!
PS: Don't like to click on redirected buttons? Cut & Paste this link in your browser:
