Social engineering warning as ‘whaling’ attacks continue.
Orlando Scott-Cowley
Mimecast today released results of a survey* of IT experts at organizations in the US, UK, South Africa and Australia. The results show the majority (55%) of organizations have seen an increase in the volume of whaling email attacks over the last three months.
Whaling attacks (also known as Business Email Compromise – BEC) use email sent from spoofed or similar sounding domain names, and appearing to be sent from the senior executives, to trick accounting or finance users into making illegitimate wire transfers to cybercriminals. The research reveals that most whaling attacks pretend to be the CEO (72%), while 36% had seen whaling emails attributed to the CFO. This type of targeted attack relies on a significant amount of prior research into a target organization to identify the victim and the organizational hierarchy around them.
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Source: https://www.mimecast.com/
