BEC Attacks on the Rise; Organizations Lose Millions of Dollars

Making the headlines

• The attackers registered a domain similar to the legitimate one used by the targeted business and used it to send emails to their targets, impersonating real employees of the company.
• In a few initial samples, the email carried an attached PDF file that pretended to be a letter from the French tax service, asking the target company for information about its customers, employees, and other financial data.

Another major BEC scam

• The campaign uses social engineering techniques, in which the attackers impersonated senior executives using Microsoft Office 365 email services.
• The campaign targeting organizations from the law, construction, finance, and retail sectors, mostly from the U.S.

Other recent email compromise attacks

• In mid-August, New York-based trading firm Virtu Financial said that it had lost $6.9 million in a business email compromise scam in May.
• A group of fraudsters named Water Nue was seen targeting business executives of over 1,000 companies across the world since March 2020.

Conclusion