Cybercriminals are conducting CEO fraud scams with increasing frequency and many organizations have already fallen victim to these attacks. Many companies have lost tens of thousands of dollars as a result of these criminal attacks. In some cases, companies have lost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

What are CEO Fraud Scams?

CEO fraud scams involve an attacker impersonating the CEO of an organization and sending an email to the CFO requesting a bank transfer to be made. The account details of the attacker are supplied, together with a legitimate reason for making the transfer.  Oftentimes, these scams involve more than one email. The first requests the transfer, followed by a second email with details of the amount and the bank details for the transaction. By the time the fraudulent transfer is discovered, the funds have been withdrawn from the account and cannot be recovered.

The FBI has issued warnings in the past about these CEO fraud scams. A spate of attacks occurred in Arizona recently. The average transfer request was between $19,000 and $75,000. An April 2016 FBI warning indicated $2.3 billion in losses had been reported between October 2013 and February 2016, with CEO fraud scams increasing by 270% since January 2015.

By training all employees on the common identifiers of phishing emails and also to be more security aware, organizations can reduce the risk of attacks being successful. However, while training is often provided to employees, it is not always given to executives and the CEO. According to a recent survey conducted by Alien Vault, only 44% of IT security professionals said every person – including the CEO – received training on how to identify a phishing email.

Protecting Against CEO Fraud Scams

It is possible to take steps to prevent CEO fraud scams. Email security solutions – SpamTitan for example – can be configured to prevent emails from spoofed domains from being delivered; however, if the email comes from the account of a CEO, there is little that can be done to prevent that email from being delivered. It is therefore essential that training is provided to all members of staff – including executives – on phishing email identification techniques.

Alien Vault polled 300 IT security professionals at Info Security Europe 2016 to determine how prepared organisations were for phishing attacks and what steps had been taken to reduce risk. The results of the survey show that the majority of organisations now provide training to reduce risk, although almost one in five are not taking proactive steps to reduce the risk of phishing and CEO fraud scams.

Almost 45% of companies said they train every single person in the organization on phishing email identification techniques, while 35.4% said that most employees are trained how to identify malicious emails. 19.7% said they do not take proactive steps and deal with phishing problems as and when they occur.

37% of Executives Have Fallen for a Phishing Scam

Out of the 300 respondents, 37% reported that at least one executive had fallen for a phishing scam in the past, while 23.9% of respondents were unaware if they had. However, even though many had experienced phishing attacks, IT security professionals were not confident that such attacks would not happen again in the future.

More than half of respondents believed that company executives could fall for a scam, while nearly 30% said that if the scam was convincing, their executives may be fooled. Only 18.5% said that their executives had been thoroughly briefed and were well aware of the dangers and would not fall for such a scam.

CEO fraud scams can be extremely lucrative for attackers, and oftentimes a considerable amount of time is spent researching companies and crafting clever emails. A variety of social engineering techniques are used and the emails can be very convincing.

Training is important, but it is also vital that efforts are made to ensure the training has been effective. The best way to ensure that all individuals have understood the training is to conduct phishing exercises – Sending dummy phishing emails in an attempt to get a response. This allows IT departments to direct further training programs and ensure that weak links are addressed.