You’re a financial controller. You get an email from your CEO (who’s abroad on business) addressing you by your first name, apologising for the email late on a Friday, but requesting you urgently make a payment to a trusted regular supplier, with account details helpfully provided in the email to save time. You’d pay it, right?
CEO fraud is an increasingly common type of phishing attack, where a threat actor impersonates a senior executive, and attempts to coerce an employee into transferring funds or personal information to the attacker’s account. The average cost of a CEO fraud attack has risen to £35,000, with one company being fleeced out of £18.5 million because of one unsuspecting financial controller[1].
But how do they keep getting away with it?
It’s all in the research
Attackers’ research is nothing short of meticulous. They scope out your CEO online, hunting through your company’s website, social media, and professional networking sites to learn all they can about that person – what they do, who they know and work with, their style of writing, and even when they’re travelling for work or on holiday. Threat actors will also thoroughly research your company, the way the company does business, and your key suppliers and customers. The more they know, the more believable their attack will seem.
“The adoption of fluent business terminology, industry knowledge and personal references from social and professional networking sites have made the deception associated with business email compromise (BEC) attacks difficult to uncover until it is too late.”[2]
Urgent emails get straight through to your inbox…
CEO fraud doesn’t rely on malicious payloads or sinister links, meaning the offending email goes unnoticed by anti-virus software and spam guards. It just looks like another email from someone within your company, without any malware attached.
… and appear to be from the real person’s email account
Adversaries create a spoof of your CEO’s email account which, at a glance, looks genuine enough – for example, changing john.smith@company.com to john.smith@compnay.com. Even more convincingly, attackers use advanced techniques such as Punycode[3] to create spoof domains where the characters in the email address look identical to the naked eye. The result? The email you receive from this domain looks like the real thing, from the real person.
You’re the right person for the job
There’s little point requesting someone to make a wire transfer who isn’t authorised to do so. As part of their research, attackers will find out who’s authorised to make transfers or change account details, and they’ll target that person. In 2017, Dublin Zoo fell victim to such an attack, where cyber criminals intercepted genuine invoices, changing payment and account details, so the attackers got nearly USD $600,000[4].
But it’s not always the finance department that gets targeted – threat actors can also request personally identifiable information (PII) from your HR team, such as tax information, which can be used for further attacks. For a quicker payday, an attacker can email the HR department requesting to change the account their salary gets paid into (diverting money to the attacker’s account). Again, it’s in line with what the target does, and isn’t too unusual a request for an employee to make.
What can be done about it?
Gartner claims “there is no technological second security layer for impersonation attacks” and “current email security does not provide users with any indicators of the trust they can put in emails”[5]. While this may be true for the majority of email security providers, PERNIX provides both.
Our comprehensive solution provides over 12 fraud detection and content checks, including a VIP module, which, checks for impersonation attacks and CEO fraud – a company’s VIPs are registered in the system, so it can tell users if emails from your CEO or claiming to be from known VIPs actually are. It also checks for those pesky Punycode spoof domains, which are otherwise undetectable. A simple traffic light banner at the top of each inbound email allows users to clearly see whether or not an email is genuine. If an email is not from the VIP it claims to be from, the banner will display a warning message, so the user instantly knows not to trust it.
Ready to sort your email security? Speak to our experts
Gartner's report recommends that security and risk managers should "consider business email compromise protection mandatory in phishing solutions"[6]. CEO fraud is on the rise – get ahead of the attackers by taking a more proactive and technological approach to your email security. PERNIX is simple to install and provides immediate protection, without costly or complicated setup. Curious about the difference it can make? Get in touch with our experts to find out.
Footnotes
More CORVID blog posts
An introduction to cybersecurity for decision-makers
Cybersecurity is an industry, a field of academia, a buzz-word, a science, an art and a bogeyman. And whilst cybersecurity cannot be avoided within any organisation that relies upon computers and data: there needs to be a way by which senior decision-makers can be involved in, and make decisions on, cybersecurity matters.
Cybersecurity is a highly specialised subject. It is complex and requires significant of knowledge and experience that is different from normal IT-knowledge. Knowing jargon and buzzwords does not mean that someone is an expert so always check the credentials of your “trusted advisors”.
Despite its overuse as a term, cybersecurity is fundamentally about protecting computer systems and data.
There are rules
Most territories now have laws around Data Privacy and many industries have regulations around information security. These must always be complied with and, irrespective of whether they are useful, they are necessary to operate in specific sectors.
Whilst the regulatory requirements may originate from the best of intentions: it is likely that organisations will need to do additional things to have the right type of cybersecurity for their specific profile and operations.
Why does anyone need cybersecurity?
Questioning why cybersecurity is needed is a good starting-point as it helps anchor solutions and initiatives to the fundamental driver behind activity in this space.
- The more you rely on (take advantage of) IT, therefore
- The bigger an impact to the organisation if something goes wrong, therefore
- The more you need cybersecurity
Cybersecurity needs to be seen as an enabler to using IT. Without cybersecurity, reliance upon IT is an incredibly risky thing to do. In-fact, one of the oldest risk equations in InfoSec (Information Security) works as follows:
Threat[1] x Impact[2] x Opportunity (Vulnerability)[3] = RISK
In mathematics if anything is multiplied by zero then the answer is zero. If there were no Threats there would be no Risk. If there was no Impact there would be no Risk and if there was no Opportunity to compromise a system there would be no Risk.
There are formal methodologies to measure the level of risk to an organisation as a result of a computer security breach. Sometimes formal assessments are useful to help shine a light on the scale of the issue. But if you are not required to undertake them then, in most cases, there is little benefit in going down this route.
Cybersecurity is a cost and, like other costs, it should be managed. For many organisations this means that the goal is to spend as little as possible on cybersecurity whilst having a proportionate level of protection considering the risk. Getting that proportionality right can be a challenge. Cybersecurity is routinely both a victim to underspending, where there is a lack of appreciation of the subject, and a cause of overspending, where the expenditure has not been objective focussed and consequently failed to achieve a useful outcome.
There are three fundamentals that an organisation needs to do regarding cybersecurity:
- Prevent an incident from occurring[4] – not all incidents can be prevented
- Detect an incident that has occurred – anti-virus cannot detect all incidents
- Respond well to an incident that has occurred – a good response can negate the impact of an incident
There may be exceptions to the above; but in-general all cybersecurity expenditure should be aligned to at least one of those three. Therefore, mapping initiatives against them can be a useful activity. Combining this with an articulation of effectiveness (a metric is best) is useful as it helps focus the initiative on the right outcomes for the organisation. At the risk of repetition: remember that cybersecurity is highly specialised. It requires specialist tools in the hands of specialist practitioners. Whilst an organisation could build their own Security Operations Centre (SOC), the question of “why?” should be raised. A company could generate its own electricity: but why would it do so?
Cyber expenditure almost always consists of both:
- Anticipated expenditure – the cost of the tool, service or technology
- Additional impact – specialist and (or) additional people, extra-training, recruitment, facilities and a distraction from core business
The following matrix (with a made-up example) is provided to help characterise cybersecurity initiatives. It is intended to be completed quickly, on the back of a post-it note, to help rapidly focus attention on the nature of the investment and whether the benefit, costs and approach have been considered. It is not intended to replace a full-investment case.
Final notes
No matter how much is spent on cybersecurity, and no matter what you are told, no company or product can guarantee safety. All anyone can do is make it less likely that an organisation will be compromised or reduce the impact of compromise. The inverse, i.e. not spending any money on cybersecurity, does not guarantee that an organisation will suffer a security breach. Not every organisation gets hit and some organisations are lucky. However, a strategy requiring luck is not recommended.
Whilst cybersecurity should be on the agenda: it should not monopolise it. Cybersecurity should be frictionless and, ideally, left to the professionals who should take the pain of it away. If cybersecurity is routinely causing you pain it is worth asking whether it is being managed as well as it could be.
Footnotes
[1] “Threat” refers to the groups or persons who do the attacking: Hackers, Nation States, Hacktivists. The entities that undertake the attack.
[2] Impact is not just the confidentiality breach of information. Depending on the circumstances, availability or integrity compromises can be highly impactful.
“Impact” is the impact to your organisation if they succeed in stealing, destroying, changing or making your systems and data unavailable.
[3] “Opportunity (Vulnerability)” is a measure of how accessible the systems and data are to attackers. Very secure government systems are not directly connected to the Internet and this reduces the Opportunity of attack considerably.
[4] Attackers have access to all the same technology that the defenders have and despite the prevalence of firewalls and anti-virus (both of which are much needed by the way), they are still able to breach organisations security and gain access to systems and data. Prevention is better than cure, but it’s just not practical to rely solely on this element.
Patching up life support: why critical care is at critical risk
Keeping people alive is unquestionably more important than patching software, but unpatched software is vulnerable to exploitation, and won’t keep anyone alive if it leads to a breach of your IT systems, rendering them unavailable.
After WannaCry exploited unpatched Windows XP vulnerabilities and cost the NHS £92m, healthcare providers across the country carried out a mass upgrade to Windows 10. Making the move to the newer OS is synonymous with increased security (you’d be worried if it wasn’t…), but there is growing concern that it was seen as a tick box, one-off exercise. Now the OS that was exploited is no longer in use, healthcare providers feel safer. This is a dangerously complacent assumption – new vulnerabilities are identified almost daily, creating an ‘arms race’ between attackers and vendors; one looking to exploit the other looking to get patches out.
The issue is further compounded as not all systems made it to Windows 10 – legacy IT systems remain where the service they provide can only run on the legacy OS. This particular stumbling block can make the health sector an easier target. Cyber attackers aren’t renowned for being a particularly moral bunch, so if they can shut down a hospital’s life support system and demand a hefty a ransom to get it back up and running again, they’ll take that payday without a second thought as to the consequences.
Let’s not forget that despite its wealth of valuable confidential data, the healthcare sector isn’t always necessarily the prime target for cyber criminals.
In the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, certain threat actor groups have claimed they won’t be targeting healthcare providers, but can’t rule out accidentally compromising systems if they’re not patched properly. Without a robust patch management programme in place, the sector can easily become an unintentional casualty of cyber attackers looking to exploit any vulnerabilities in any business. Just look at WannaCry.
The NHS is the nation’s beating heart, and healthcare providers know better than anyone that a beating heart stopping is a very bad thing. You can’t fix vulnerabilities you don’t know about, but you can guarantee threat actors will find them. You need full visibility of where your IT estate’s weaknesses are, and clear guidance on how to fix them. Even if you’re not a target, an unpatched infrastructure leaves you open to exploitation by opportunistic cyber attackers and widespread malware campaigns.
We’d like to offer all healthcare providers a free introductory scoping call to discuss how CORVID can help you identify and patch vulnerabilities and strengthen your cyber defences. Simply let us know what time is best for you, and we’ll do the rest.
