You have a backdoor to your business, and it's Email

You have a backdoor to your business, and it's Email

Email is the most widely used form of business communication today. It’s inexpensive and fast. This form of communication, however, exposes businesses to cyber criminals.
                                            
Malicious cyber criminals consider the email as businesses’ backdoor – a vulnerable feature of a computer system that calls for exploitation. Failing to protect your business emails is like fortifying your house with the latest alarm systems and then leaving your backdoor wide open.
 
Symantec in its 2016 Internet Security Threat Report estimated that nearly 190 billion emails were in circulation each day in 2015 alone, with an average of 42 emails sent and received by each business user every day – a growing number of users reading their emails on their mobile devices.
 
Symantec reported that in 2015, email spam rate increased by 53%; phishing rate at one in 1,846 emails; and malware rate in one in 220 emails. “For cybercriminals who want to reach the largest number of people electronically, email is still the favored way to do it,” Symantec said.

3 Ways Cyber Criminals Exploit the Vulnerabilities of Emails

​Cyber criminals exploit the vulnerabilities of emails in a number of ways. Here are 3 ways cyber criminals exploit emails:

1. Business Email Compromise (BEC) Scams

​The cyber threat called business email compromise (BEC) relies on the oldest trick of con artists: deception. In BEC, con artists zero in employees who have access to company’s finances, deceiving them into making wire transfers to bank accounts thought to belong to business partners – when in fact, the money ends up in the accounts of cyber criminals.
 
BEC is one form of phishing – a form of identity theft that tricks people to reveal their Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and other valuable details – by making an email looks like it came from a legitimate source such as a bank, a partner company or government agency.   
 
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that since 2013, organized crime groups, employing the business email compromise scam, have targeted small and large organizations and companies in every U.S. state and more than 100 countries around the world. According to the FBI, since January 2015, there has been a 1,300 percent increase in BEC, with losses now totaling over $3 billion.
 
Tech giants such as Google and Facebook are not spared by BEC scammers. In March 2017, the FBI arrested Evaldas Rimasauskas for scamming multinational internet companies of over $100 million via email compromise scheme. While the FBI didn’t name the companies, a Fortune investigation revealed that the multinational internet companies referred by the FBI as victims of Rimasauskas were tech giants Google and Facebook. In the Rimasauskas case, Google and Facebook thought they were communicating via email with a legitimate staff of Quanta – supplier of the tech giants’ computer servers. 

Business Email Compromise (BEC) Scams Prevention

BEC scams can be prevented in the following manner:

• Be wary of emails requesting for wire transfer. Carefully examine all email requests for transfer of funds to find out if the requests are out of the ordinary.
• Verify the authenticity of the wire transfer requests by walking into the CEO’s office or by talking to him or her on the phone.
• Confirm requests for transfers of funds by using phone verification as part of a two-factor authentication. In this verification process, use previously known numbers, not the numbers provided in the email request.

Phishing Scams Prevention

Here are some of the ways to prevent phishing scams in general:

• Be cautious if someone contacts your company online and requests for detailed business information.
• Keep in mind that no financial institution will email you and ask you for sensitive information such as PIN and account numbers as the financial institution already has that information.

2. Malware Spread

​Email is one of the oldest ways to spread malware – short for “malicious software” – software designed to damage or infiltrate computers without the users’ consent. In May 2000, the malware called “ILOVEYOU” infiltrated millions of computers. The ILOVEYOU malware comes in a form of an email from someone the receiver know, with a subject "ILOVEYOU" and the body of the message reads "kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me."
 
An enormous number of people – probably out of the universal need to be loved – opened the ILOVEYOU email and downloaded the attached file. Once run, the malware overwrites all computer files and then send an identical email to all the contacts of a victim's Outlook address book. As a result of the ILOVEYOU malware, a number of mail systems worldwide were overloaded causing a meltdown of electronic communication among businesses and governments.

Malware Spread Prevention

Here are some of the ways to combat the spread of malware sent via emails:

• Don’t open emails or attachments or click links from unknown or untrusted sources.
• Don’t open email attachments that end in .vbs, .bat, .exe, .com.
• If a person you know sends you an attachment that looks suspicious, contact the person first to verify what the attachment is all about.

3. Denial of Service (DoS) Attack

​A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is an attempt by cyber criminals to prevent legitimate users from accessing online services like email. Spam email messages can be used by attackers to prevent your customers from emailing your company.
 
Email accounts, whether supplied by a paid service or free services such as Yahoo or Gmail, are assigned a specific quota. This quota limits the number of emails that your business account can receive at a given period of time. When attackers bombard your business account with too many or large email messages, this can consume your quota and prevents your company from receiving legitimate messages.

DoS Attack Prevention

To prevent DoS attack.

• Reduce spam messages by following good security practices for distributing your company’s email address. Exercise caution when releasing your company’s email address online, in-person or on paper. Spammers can easily collect any email address posted on a website.
• Use filters or spam tagging.
• Disable the automatic downloading of graphics in HTML mail.

When you have questions, connect with us and get the answers you need.