Cyberattack and the Risk to Wire Transfers
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the perfect time to provide some common-sense tips to avoid a common risk facing businesses: business email compromise and wire fraud. Businesses of all shapes and sizes use email, and those accounts are susceptible to attempts to trick employees into providing sensitive information or sending money. The perpetrators of business email compromise scams send authentic-looking messages and use a sense of urgency to trick an employee into acting quickly without verifying the sender’s identity. With respect to wire fraud, bad actors have made a business of hacking into corporate email systems, perpetrating the “man in the middle attack” whereby the bad actor jumps into a conversation between individuals communicating by email. Often, this conversation involves discussion of a scheduled transaction, and the bad actor modifies wire instructions so the payment, which may be substantial, ends up with the bad actor, not the intended recipient. Typically...