As Director of Operations at Hudson Contract, the buck stops with me when it comes to online safety and security. As you’d expect, we continually monitor our systems to ensure all our data is kept secure and review our processes to keep our team safe from threats.
What kind of threats? Well according to a new report from insurance giant AIG, cyber crime that results in financial loss arrives most frequently by way of a business email compromise:
23% - Business email compromise |
6% - Other virus/malware infections |
18% - Ransomware |
5% - System failure/outages |
14% - Data breach by hackers |
5% - Physical loss or theft of information assets |
14% - Data breach by employee negligence |
4% - Denial of service attacks |
8% - Impersonation fraud |
3% - Non-ransomware cyber extortion |
Thanks to behind-the-scenes protection from SSL and TLS – which uses encryption to protect the transfer of data – email itself is a lot more secure than it used to be. But the weakest link is the user, and this type of cyber crime has leapt from 17% of online frauds at the time of AIG’s previous survey, in 2017.
What happens most often is that someone gets a ‘phishing’ email with a link or attachment and when the recipient clicks on it, the perpetrator gains access to their inbox and can send and receive emails from the victim’s email address while frequently deploying malware to spread the scam to contacts in the victim’s inbox.
Attackers often target people who are responsible for sending payments, sending them an email that appears to come from a superior, instructing them to transfer funds, in the hope that the business has no procedures in place to prevent this from happening.
For someone like myself, this is frustrating, because it’s not so difficult to keep one step ahead of the scammers. Here’s some basic guidance:
Ten ways to stay safe from email fraud:
For further help and information take a look at these guides:
The Little Book of Big Scams |
10 Step to Cyber Security |