Trend Micro which recently conducted a study on Business Email Compromise has come to a conclusion that company CEOs are spoofed the most, while CFOs and finance directors were the top targets of the said variant of cyber attacks.
And in another report compiled by FBI, the Global losses from business email compromise (BEC) since 2013 have reached to $5.3 billion. Trend Micro’s latest finding on this issue almost coincides with what has been discovered by FBI.
In the year 2017 Midyear Security Roundup: The Cost of Compromise report, Trend Micro has come to a conclusion that cyber criminals are continuing to use schemes such as bogus invoices, or supplier swindles, and employ keylogger malware or HTML pages in phishing emails to spoof employees.
While CEOs are becoming an easy target to such emails; managing directors and directors are said to be next on the list. Trend Micro revealed that CFOs were targeted in more than 3000 plus instances of BEC attempts.
Coming to the ratio recorded country wise, the United States topped the list of the majority of attempted BEC attacks, with 30.96%. It is being followed by Australia, with 27.4% and the United Kingdom with 22.46%. Norway and Canada stand in third and fourth position with 4.88% and 3.44 % respectively.
Thus, as per the researchers of Trend Micro, the only way to curb BEC attacks is to simultaneously take up employee training along with a holistic security solution in defending enterprises from a variety of BEC attacks.
Note- Trend Micro said that it blocked over 38 billion threats during the 1Q of 2017 via its Small Protection Network. It added that most of the threats were emails that contained malicious content such as attachments or links.
