Phishing awareness SecAware

Socially-engineering people into opening malicious messages, attachments and links is an effective way for social engineers to bypass many technical security controls. Phishing is a business enterprise, a highly profitable and successful one making this a growth industry. Just as Advanced Persistent Threats take malware to a higher level of risk, so Business Email Compromise puts an even more sinister spin on regular phishing. With BEC, the social engineering is custom-designed to coerce employees in powerful, trusted corporate roles to compromise their organisations, for example by making unauthorised and inappropriate wire transfers or online payments from corporate bank accounts to accounts controlled by the fraudsters. As with ordinary phishing, there is plenty of latitude among the fraudsters behind BEC and other novel forms of social engineering and fraud, and we can expect to see more numerous, sophisticated and costly incidents as a result. Aggressive dark-side innovation is a ...