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- Trend snippet: BEC scammers are on the prowl in the distributed work ennvironment
Trends in Security Information
The HSD Trendmonitor is designed to provide access to relevant content on various subjects in the safety and security domain, to identify relevant developments and to connect knowledge and organisations. The safety and security domain encompasses a vast number of subjects. Four relevant taxonomies (type of threat or opportunity, victim, source of threat and domain of application) have been constructed in order to visualize all of these subjects. The taxonomies and related category descriptions have been carefully composed according to other taxonomies, European and international standards and our own expertise.
In order to identify safety and security related trends, relevant reports and HSD news articles are continuously scanned, analysed and classified by hand according to the four taxonomies. This results in a wide array of observations, which we call ‘Trend Snippets’. Multiple Trend Snippets combined can provide insights into safety and security trends. The size of the circles shows the relative weight of the topic, the filters can be used to further select the most relevant content for you. If you have an addition, question or remark, drop us a line at info@securitydelta.nl.
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BEC scammers are on the prowl in the distributed work ennvironment
Business Email Compromise and Business Email Spoofing Business email compromise (BEC) is the formal name for a specific kind of spam that centers around a fraudulent request for money. In a BEC attack, a spammer sends messages that have been crafted to look like they originate from a high-level executive within a company, directing someone at a lower level to perform some kind of financial transfer or complete a large purchase on behalf of that executive. Attackers may do this by spoofing the appearance of internal emails (sometimes called Business Email Spoofing) or they may try to take control of accounts on the organization's own mail server, and use that account to send the fraudulent request.
BEC attackers, posing as an executive, may ask the targeted employee to buy expensive gift cards or expedite a financial transaction of some kind. The attacks are usually highly tailored to the targeted individuals and organizations. BEC email messages look nothing like malicious spam, because they fail to follow spam-like patterns; they (often) don’t contain an attachment or malicious link, and they try to look like they originated from within the targeted organization, at times even incorporating the target organization’s typical mail “signatures” or other elements that may be familiar to employees, to make them more convincing to the target than conventional malicious spam.
BEC scams rely on the target of the scam (the employee) being physically distant from the subject of the scam (the executive), and it also depends on the target acting quickly, before anyone can figure out what’s going on and stop the target from buying gift cards or making bank transfers. BEC scammers may craft a message when they know the executive is out of the office on business. These kinds of fraudulent requests often involve some back-and-forth between the attacker and target. The conversation may start with a simple request for the target to respond to the scammer and progress into a series of messages that eventually lead to an “ask” to make a purchase based on a plausible-sounding pretext.
Back when most of us were working in offices, physical proximity between the target and subject would have made the scam immediately apparent. But our current distributed work environment, where both the executive and employee are unlikely to be in the same physical proximity, reduces the opportunities for people to just walk over to someone’s desk and ask them to confirm the request
BEC scams existed prior to the COVID-19 era, but as more people are working remotely, BEC scammers are on the prowl. As an attack against the better nature of people who just want to be helpful and supportive, it is a particularly offensive type of scam. If you encounter emails like these, trust your gut and speak to the subject in question directly, if you can, or ask for guidance from someone else if you can’t reach them. The more real employees get involved in handling these requests, the more likely it will be that the scam will be discovered before any damage is done.