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IT companies in Houston can help you keep your business secure against the latest and most pernicious cyberattacks. One of the most effective and damaging attacks today is the CEO Fraud Attack. Such attacks reportedly have a 90% success rate while traditional phishing attacks enjoy 30% success. This becomes even more alarming when one considers CEO-targeted attacks tend to cost companies much more.
One of the reasons for this is that social engineering hacks are usually used for this purpose rather than traditional malware. With malware, a program must be designed, it’s got to be “spammed” across a wide network of potential targets, and as the statistic above demonstrates, only three out of 10 “bites” on the “phishing line” will end up bringing the hackers money. It’s more work for less pay.
How CEO Fraud Attacks Work
How is this done? Well, it’s a technique called “spear phishing.” All a hacker has to do is look up social media accounts like Facebook and LinkedIn. They’re able to get email addresses this way.
Let’s say your company’s CEO has an email address of JohnCMichaels@CompanyServer.net. Now say someone in purchasing gets an email from JonCMichaels@CompanySever.net and this email asks for a certain sum to be sent to a certain place by a certain time for a certain acquisition.
Did you spot the difference in the false email address? Two characters are missing. But the eye scans right over the email address, and it shows up in the employee’s inbox under the name of the CEO. When your CEO tells you to send a certain sum to a certain place, it’s incumbent on you to do that, isn’t it?
This could also be done between a CEO and managerial personnel with higher authority than this individual. There are a lot of different ways a spear-phishing attack can be accomplished, but primarily they’re going to focus on strategically weak points in areas of security. IT companies in Houston can help your business design practices to prevent such vulnerabilities from being exploited. For example, you might use something like multi-phase authentication to approve asset transfers. If you’re unfamiliar, multi-phase authentication basically means there are multiple ways someone’s identity is verified. Perhaps an email is sent back to the CEO for confirmation as part of an operational protocol process. Perhaps an email can’t be sent to certain departments without doubly identifying the sender through an automatically sent text message with an authorization code.
Securing Operations
There are many ways this can be done, and there are additional means of security beyond multi-phase authentication that are worth considering. IT security must always remain on the cutting edge to be successful. Using such a solution will give you access to known, successful techniques, as well as emerging ones. The right IT security group can provide:
- Email Protection
- Antivirus and Antimalware Solutions
- Modern Firewalls
- Proactive Monitoring
- Automatic Patches and Upgrades
- Backup and Data Recovery Solutions
IT companies in Houston through ICS can provide these and other security solutions. Contact us to protect your business against harmful attacks with a high rate of success and a high rate of loss.
Further reading
ICS is a Texas-based 40-year-old technology company specializing in Managed IT, VoIP, Video Conferencing and Video Surveillance solutions for US and International businesses. ICS has over 4000 regional installations and specializes in multi-site businesses between 25 and 2500 employees. ICS’s customers enjoy the experience of ICS’s Total Care program which provides clients flat fee services with obsolescence and growth protection. Whether a customer elects to deploy their IT, Video Conferencing or VoIP in the cloud or on the customer’s premise, ICS can provide a full turn-key solution for our clients under one flat monthly fee.