Recently I was lucky enough to spend some time with a group of my Ozzie peers.\u00a0 One of the things we did was share problems and solutions. During those discussions, I heard of the following hack.<\/p>\n
[header2 text=”This is not a made-up story.\u00a0 It is true and I know of similar fraud in NZ.” align=”left” color=”#336A40″ margintop=””]<\/b><\/p>\n
The IT Company I was talking to had a smallish client.\u00a0 They had five employees and their biggest cost was shipping\/transport, with around $AUS150,000 a month spent with one supplier.\u00a0\u00a0 As expected, the monthly invoice arrived and $160,000 was paid into the requested bank account.\u00a0 The following week they receive a polite phone call asking why that month\u2019s invoice was unpaid.<\/p>\n
How did this happen?<\/strong><\/p>\n It started with an email account being hacked. \u00a0In this case it was the supplier’s email account.\u00a0 But I also know of examples where it was the victim’s account that was hacked.\u00a0 The hackers read through all the emails and found the recurring pattern of monthly invoice and payment.\u00a0 They then faked an invoice, adding a new bank account number to it<\/strong>.\u00a0 Before executing the scam, they added rules to the mailbox which would hide all legitimate emails between the supplier and client.<\/p>\n Execution was simple.\u00a0 They sent the invoice requesting payment to the new bank account, as if it came from the supplier, using their email system.\u00a0 The ‘sent’ email was hidden, as was the response confirming payment. The money was paid into an Australian bank account.\u00a0 Upon receipt, it was transferred out of the account and the country within minutes.<\/strong><\/p>\n [header2 text=”What can you do to protect yourself?” align=”left” color=”#336A40″ margintop=””]<\/b><\/p>\n Process.<\/strong><\/p>\n Every company should have a policy around confirming changes to bank accounts.\u00a0 Kinetics recommends that process includes a phone call, as relying solely on email leaves you exposed to this type of scam.\u00a0 (With access to the mailbox, the scammer controls any email conversation.) This policy must be strictly adhered too.\u00a0 There is a very similar scam where the CEO\u2019s email is hacked or copied, and used to instruct accounts to transfer money to a new account.<\/p>\n Monitoring, reviews and awareness.<\/strong><\/p>\n This fraud starts with a social engineering and then makes use of legitimate features inside mail systems.\u00a0 The signs of an issue can be slight and difficult to spot.\u00a0 To tackle it, we need to be looking in multiple places for trends and changes that add up to something new.<\/p>\n The primary reason for my trip to Australia was to share and gather ideas on security.\u00a0 Kinetics is developing new initiatives around security.\u00a0 Fraud has become more targeted and social engineering more lucrative.\u00a0 New systems and tools are needed to safeguard users as well as data.\u00a0 Some of these new tools are already in use and others will be available shortly.\u00a0 You can expect to hear a lot more about security over the coming weeks.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bill Lunam is Kinetics Groups Operations Manager.\u00a0 Bill has over 25 years of IT experience and is passionate about IT for SME business.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I was lucky enough to spend some time with a group of my Ozzie peers.\u00a0 One of the things we did was share problems and solutions. During those discussions, I heard of the following hack. [header2 text=”This is not a made-up story.\u00a0 It is true and I know of similar fraud in NZ.” align=”left” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2422,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}