This is how hackers can steal millions from your company with just one email
Imagine a corporate bookkeeper gets an email from his CEO that says, “Hey, I need the W-2s for everybody in the company.” The diligent bookkeeper gathers the requested tax documents and sends them off to the executive. But the initial email wasn’t really penned by the CEO—it was written by a crook who broke into the executive’s email account. The goal: to carry out a new type of cybercrime called “business email compromise” or BEC, which hackers have used to try to steal billions of dollars in recent years.
“Our adversaries are opportunists,” says FBI agent Mitchell Thompson, speaking to reporters on Tuesday in New York City in Lower Manhattan at a roundtable to discuss growing online threats. “They look for vulnerabilities to exploit.”
There are several different kinds of BEC crimes, including the executive impersonation described above, which first appeared just before the 2016 tax season. Once hackers steals your information, they can sell it to other criminals or use it for lucrative credit card and tax refund scams.
