It appears that cyber criminals take off time for Christmas and New Year, after a study from Agari claims business email compromise (BEC) attacks fell dramatically in the last two weeks of December 2019.
Agari claims cybercriminal organizations operate like any legitimate business. They establish mentor/mentee relationships, buy the same prospect list and tools which are used by real enterprises and then study the market to identify consumer behaviours.
These attacks happen by tricking an employee to believe they have been emailed by a CEO, CFO or other role of authority and need help with something.
Agari’s quarterly Email Fraud and Identity Deception Trends report found that individual impersonation types of BEC attacks increased to 32% between October and December 2019, rising from 12% in Q2 2019.
The company claims that 94% of breaches occur through the email channel, with only one compromised email leading to catastrophic cyber incidents.
Agari founder and CEO Patrick Peterson said, “People tend to snicker when they hear about email scams, because they immediately think of the old Prince of Nigeria schemes. But those schemes have matured into sophisticated, socially engineered attacks that equate to billions of dollars in reported fraud loss.
“Phishing scams are a gateway to money-laundering crimes. So for the biggest companies in the world to overlook basic cybersecurity measures, like email authentication or automation, is baffling.”
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