Despite hearing mostly about BEC attacks in English-speaking countries, analysis of new attack groups highlight the threat of these kinds of attacks in other languages.
English-speaking countries don’t have the monopoly on victim organizations that part with their money easily! According to new analysis of BEC attacks by cybersecurity vendor Abnormal Security, it only takes two threat groups – Midnight Hedgehog and Mandarian Capybara – to launch BEC attacks impersonating executives in 13 different languages!
How do they do it? According to Abnormal Security, exactly the same way legitimate Marketing and Sales teams do: they use online services to identify prospects and contact information, then use online translation services to localize the BEC emails.
Why be worried? Abnormal says it best:
We’ve taught our users to look for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors to better identify when they may have received an attack. When these are not present, there are fewer alarm bells to alert native speakers that something isn’t right.
In other words, if you’re going to train your users via Security Awareness Training to be vigilant when working with email, spelling and grammar are going to matter less, and the fact that an email is unexpected, unsolicited, unusual, etc. alone become the only red flag needed to at least warrant further scrutiny of the message’s sender, it’s links or attachments, etc. before interacting with it legitimately.
