UAE based company Cheers Exhibition which is into stand building business for companies hosting their products & services at exhibitions has admitted that it has become a victim of a phishing cyber attack recently.
And as per the latest update released to the media, its website has been pulled down as the website content holding server was also in control of hackers.
Binu Manaf, the CEO and the Managing Director of Cheers Exhibition admitted on Sunday that his company’s email server was hacked by threat actors who later accessed some of the email correspondence of the clients. This is said to have led to a crude phishing attack where cybercriminals managed to get $53,000 by fraudulently posing as a client and managing to get the wired funds into an overseas bank account.
As per the details available to Cybersecurity Insiders, the company realized that its email servers were hacked when one of its clients called them to inquire about an email request to transfer funds into an overseas bank account.
When an inquiry was made into the issue, it was found that the email servers of Cheers Exhibition were already compromised making a Russian client a victim to the Phishing attack by remitting $53K into an unknown bank account as advised by a fraudulent email.
Note 1– A Phishing email attack is a kind of attack where hackers are seen fraudulently posing as genuine clients on a digital note and stealing credentials of users or tricking them to direct money to overseas bank accounts.
Note 2– As per a report compiled by security researchers from Cloud-based email management company Mimecast from London, 91% of cyber attacks are being triggered by email in UAE.
