Gardaí have reported a sharp increase in the number of invoice redirect and CEO fraud-style attacks on Irish businesses in the last few months. “We are getting a couple of cases every week now”, according to Detective Superintendent Pat Lordan, who said that both small and large companies are being hit for amounts ranging from €10,000 into the millions.
Every year, the number of phishing scams seems to be increasing, with the malware-ridden emails getting continually more sophisticated and convincing. The latest global phishing campaign purporting to be from international courier giants DHL has been tricking users into opening a fake PDF attachment – and subsequently unleashed a previously unseen piece of malware to wreak havoc on their PCs.
Cyber criminals have always targeted users, finding it easier to trick unsuspecting employees than to bypass complex technical security measures – and this trend has been growing steadily the last few years. Identify fraud, where criminals impersonate someone else in order to steal their money or use their account to manipulate others, is now one of the most common types of cyber crime there is. Account takeover attacks, where criminals gain access to a user’s account and use it to send spam or phishing emails, is also on the rise, often allowing malicious emails to bypass email security filters.
It’s been a bad year for Facebook so far. They recently revealed that they may have improperly shared the details of 87 million users with a third-party, the now-infamous political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Then, on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted during a press conference that “malicious actors” may have took advantage of Facebook to obtain the public data of all or most of Facebook’s 2.2 billion strong user base.
A macro is a small piece of code that runs within a software program such as Microsoft Word or Excel, and is normally used to automate common or repetitive tasks. Macro malware is the practice of hiding a virus in a macro code and enticing unsuspecting users into downloading a Word or Excel file and running the macro script within, which then will download a virus, malware or even ransomware onto that person’s PC. Macro malware was common during the 1990s, but lapsed in popularity through most of the 21st century as increasingly savvy PC users learned how to spot the spam or phishing emails that delivered them, which were often riddled with typos. Nowadays, however, macro malware is seeing a big return due to two factors – Phishing emails are becoming increasingly sophisticated and no longer have obvious typos in them, and ransomware – a very profitable form of malware for criminals – can be easily downloaded via a macro, leading to entire networks being encrypted and held to ransom. It is now critical that all users understand the threats that macro malware can pose, particularly to their organisation, and learn how to spot the attacks before it’s too late.
