Don’t take the bait
These days, hacking is just as much about behavioral psychology as it is actual technology. The fancy term is “social engineering,” but what we’re really talking about is getting conned. One of the fastest growing trends in cybercrime is spear phishing, in which a hacker sends someone an email that appears to be from a recognized business or individual, but in fact is just an attempt to get sensitive information. Spear phishing attacks accounted for about 17 percent of incident response activities in 2015, with tricking executives and finance personnel into paying fraudulent invoices high on hackers’ list of strategies.
These kinds of scams aren’t small potatoes. Earlier this year, hackers stole $81 million from a Bangladeshi bank through a spear phishing attack. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last year coined the term business email compromise (BEC) to specifically describe the type of scam that targets companies that perform regular wire transfers. Heimerl expects that trend to do nothing but grow this year, so businesses should wise up on security basics.
These days, hacking is just as much about behavioral psychology as it is actual technology. The fancy term is “social engineering,” but what we’re really talking about is getting conned. One of the fastest growing trends in cybercrime is spear phishing, in which a hacker sends someone an email that appears to be from a recognized business or individual, but in fact is just an attempt to get sensitive information. Spear phishing attacks accounted for about 17 percent of incident response activities in 2015, with tricking executives and finance personnel into paying fraudulent invoices high on hackers’ list of strategies.
These kinds of scams aren’t small potatoes. Earlier this year, hackers stole $81 million from a Bangladeshi bank through a spear phishing attack. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last year coined the term business email compromise (BEC) to specifically describe the type of scam that targets companies that perform regular wire transfers. Heimerl expects that trend to do nothing but grow this year, so businesses should wise up on security basics.
