Fraudulent schemes centered around COVID-19 are becoming more and more prevalent. From selling negative tests on the black market to stolen vaccine intellectual property, the next scam might be in your inbox. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cyber Division released a statement:
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a mass shift to telework among many US businesses, resulting in increased use of web-based email applications. According to recent FBI reporting, cybercriminals are implementing auto-forwarding rules on victims’ web-based email clients to conceal their activities. The web-based client’s forwarding rules often do not sync with the desktop client, limiting the rules’ visibility to cybersecurity administrators. Cybercriminals then capitalize on this reduced visibility to increase the likelihood of a successful business email compromise (BEC).
Fox News reports, as described by the FBI, “in a typical business email scam, a criminal spoofs, or mimics a legitimate email address. Often, the message appears to be from within the company or from a client.” With the recognizable email address, “the scammer typically requests a payment, wire transfer or gift card purchase that, if successful, funnels the money to a criminal organization.”
Business email compromise (BEC), also known as email account compromise (EAC) is “one of our most challenging fraud issues impacting businesses at a very large scale due to the impact that COVID-19 has had, specifically from forcing people to do all of their business activities from the telework methodology” said Nino Perrotta, Principal of Sequoia Security Group.
“BEC fraud does not discriminate against any business. Small or large can fall prey to such scams” added Perrotta. Fox News reports BEC schemes resulted “in more than $1.7 billion in worldwide losses, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2019,” before the coronavirus obliterated all normalcy of how we conduct business.
When employees are not in an office setting, you not only have the normal business challenges, but the ability to discuss invoices or transactions with their boss or colleagues is gone, says Perrotta. The FBI warns in August, cybercriminals created auto-forwarding email rules on a recently upgraded web client of a U.S.-based medical equipment company.
“The webmail did not sync to the desktop application and went unnoticed by the victim company, which only observed auto-forwarding rules on the desktop client” stated the FBI notification. “The danger,” explains Perrotta, “with the email forwarding process, the goal is to further authenticate the scheme for those that go to the history of the email; they can easily be tricked into believing that the fraud email is in fact legitimate.”
