The CEO scam is back, watch out for cyber fraud targeting companies

CEO fraud (or CEO fraud) is back in the discussion, but what is it? It is a computer fraud through which criminals pose as a manager or CEO of a company by ordering the employee to carry out an urgent and confidential banking transaction, essential for the success of a negotiation or an ongoing project .

It can target any employee of a company, especially those who have access to economic and financial resources or who are authorized to issue payments and transfers.

What are the ways attackers commit CEO fraud? Here are two of the most common examples:

They pretend to be an executive requesting an urgent and secret business transaction. They often take advantage of the fact that the CEO is traveling or know that he will not answer the phone. They pretend to be a supplier who needs to urgently change the current account for the next payment. It is very difficult to thwart these fraud attempts because the scammers are very skilled and manage to disguise their identity. The main recommendation in these cases is undoubtedly raising staff awareness of these phenomena.

So what can be done to prevent this type of fraud?
Here are some tips:

• Check the sender’s email address to make sure it’s theirs. Scammers send their communications from email addresses that pretend to be genuine, so be careful of content that appears after the “@”.
• Check the wording of the text: the content of these emails often contains grammatical and spelling errors.
• Exercise caution when the instructions in the email are unusual, very urgent, and confidential.
• Contact the sender, via telephone or other channel, to confirm the request received, but do not do so by replying to the email.
• Contact the sender, by phone or other channel, to confirm the new account number to make the payment, but do not do so by replying to the email you receive.
• Avoid posting business email addresses on the Internet and sharing them with people you don’t trust.
• Do not share your company’s organizational chart information with third parties.
• Do not download attachments called “invoice”, “payment order”, “purchase order”, etc. if they come from a suspicious email.