Source: www.trendmicro.com
Simplicity and high returns—these sum up why Business Email Compromise schemes are attractive to cybercriminals. True enough, this attack vector has been greatly exploited, as evidenced by the amount of money that victims lost to it in 2016. According to a report by the FBI released in May 2016, victims lost $3 billion to BEC scams. In 2017, we predict that BEC will remain a prominent threat and will be used in more targeted scams.
One of the types of BEC scams is CEO fraud, wherein the perpetrators spoof or hack into the e-mail of an organization's executive in order to initiate a fund transfer to their own accounts. While, it’s not technically sophisticated, organizations should step up their defenses against this type of scheme, and one of the ways is being able to identify the signs that an e-mail message is being used in CEO fraud. Here’s what you should watch out for to keep the threat at bay: