SMBs are becoming Top Target for Cyber Attacks
28 June 2021
SafeAeon Inc.Small and Medium Businesses are Increasingly Target for financial fraud attacks.
What a plausibility, a phone call saved a mid-market firm from transferring about $100,000 to hackers posing as its chief financial officer.
The hackers had breached the CFO’s Office 365 account via malware and lurked there, gathering intelligence for more than a month. [Posing as the CFO,] the hackers sent the accounts payable person email, saying, “I am unable to login to the bank to do the ACH — can you reset my account?” So, she had done that. The accounts payable person just happened to get on a phone call with the CFO on another topic, and discovered she was responding to an email thread from the hacker posing as the CFO. The money was already sent when they discovered the ploy — just in time to contact their bank and have the calamitous SWIFT transaction reversed.
Many small and medium businesses have holes in their cybersecurity protections and miss some critical “tell-tales” before realizing they had been hacked.
The hackers went through CFO’s entire history of emails to plan this attack out. They were monitoring it to see when he was going to be out of town. If you are out of town, it’s more likely to succeed. We see scenarios like these pan out day in day out. This kind of scenario plays out in Small to Medium Businesses across the board, catching too many off guards, according to Cisco’s new “Small and Mighty” Cybersecurity Special Report.
Hackers target smaller and mid-market firms
SMBs are more and more the focus of cyber-attacks and serve as a launching pad or back door for bigger cyber-crime campaigns. Further, only 38 percent of SMBs have an active cyber-risk strategy to mitigate smb cyber attacks (see statistics).
Many small/mid-market businesses are only starting to realize how attractive they are to cybercriminals. More so, that realization comes often too late-after an attack. It is difficult and costly, recovering from a cyber-attack — if not impossible — for these businesses.
SMBs need to know that Office 365, Gmail, and all cloud-based email services are under constant brute force attacks. It is also vital for them to understand that hacking is not personal — and being small is no protection.
Actionable Steps to Secure Your Business
- Ensure to have antivirus and anti-malware for real-time threat protection and robust endpoint protection.
- Install a better firewall such as Fortinet, Palo Alto, CheckPoint
- Deploy two-factor authentication for bank logins, all financial transactions, PC logins, Google, and Office 365.
And the most important
- 24×7 Monitoring of internal assets, endpoints, and cloud applications.
Now, 24×7 SOC Monitoring has been the fiefdom of Big Enterprises till now due to associated costs.
Trust SafeAeon to Safeguard Your Business
SafeAeon SOC-as-a-Service is designed to fill this gap at a price point that works for both Managed Service Providers and Small to Medium Businesses.
SafeAeon is introducing premium Quality SOC-as-a-Service at Industry Beating Prices. Hence Small and Medium Businesses can afford 24×7 SOC Monitoring and focus on their core competency.
SafeAeon’s 24×7 Security Teams work around the clock to monitor, detect, and respond to cyber-attacks before they have the chance to impact your business. Our highly trained, certified, and expert team providing exceptional services at an affordable price like never seen before.