This week:
3 – One email could cost you €12,000.
2 – If your systems are unavailable, your business is unavailable.
1 – If your phone could talk, what would it say about you?
3 – One email could cost you €12,000.
“Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) [in Ireland] were conned out of almost €10 million by email scammers in 2023”.
Summary:
The Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland is urging small and medium-sized businesses to review their payments processes as they continue to be fooled by emails from scammers, There was a “23.8 per cent rise in the number of email scams reported last year with businesses losing an average of €12,000”. The scams “often start with what appears to be a legitimate email from a supplier known to the business advising of new bank details for payment”.
So what?
If anyone tells you that their bank details have changed, you should be hearing alarm bells going off in your head. At a minimum, you should be confirming their request by calling them on the phone using a number that you have on file for them.
Source: The Irish Times
2 – When your systems are unavailable, your business is unavailable.
“Our systems are currently unavailable. We are unavailable.”
Summary:
An honest appraisal of the situation by a US credit union after it was hit by ransomware in recent weeks.
As a result of the attack in late June, the credit union had to take customer-facing systems offline. Needless to say, the attack occurred at an inconvenient time (over a weekend, and at the end of a month / quarter), causing maximum disruption to customers. Based on the credit union’s security updates, it looks like many systems and business processes were restored by July 15, but a number still remain offline almost 3 weeks later.
So what?
Banking customers are ‘sticky’. Even after an outage like this, the percentage of customers who will leave this credit union will probably be very low. If a similar outage occurred in your business, could you rely on the same level of ‘stickiness’, or would your customers (and your future income) head for the exits?
Source: The Register (and sent my way by SOC2 Auditor Extraordinaire, Angelika Mayen)
1 – If your phone could talk, what would it say about you?
The call and text message records of tens of millions of US AT&T cellphone customers are now in the hands of cyber criminals.
Summary:
Following a cyber attack on AT&T, criminals now have a record of every US and Canadian number that US AT&T customers called or texted between May and October 2022, the number of times they interacted, and the call duration for specific days and months. In some cases, the general location of the phone at the time of a call / text may also have been exposed.
So what?
If someone had access to this data from your phone, what would it say about you? At a minimum, I hope it would prove that you speak to your spouse more frequently than your local takeaway!
Source: CNN (and shared on LinkedIn by Dale Crump).