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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday December 26 2015, @09:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the moby-dick dept.

If you work in finance or accounting and receive an email from your boss asking you to transfer some funds to an external account, you might want to think twice.

That's because so-called "whaling" attacks -- a refined kind of phishing in which hackers use spoofed or similar-sounding domain names to make it look like the emails they send are from your CFO or CEO -- are on the rise, according to security firm Mimecast.

If fact, 55 percent of the 442 IT professionals Mimecast surveyed this month said their organizations have seen an increase in the volume of whaling attacks over the past three months, the firm reported on Wednesday.

Those organizations spanned the U.S., U.K., South Africa and Australia.

Domain-spoofing is the most popular strategy, accounting for 70 percent of such attacks, Mimecast said; the majority pretend to be the CEO, but some 35 percent of organizations had seen whaling emails attributed to the CFO.

"Whaling emails can be more difficult to detect because they don't contain a hyperlink or malicious attachment, and rely solely on social engineering to trick their targets," said Orlando Scott-Cowley, a cybersecurity strategist with Mimecast.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @11:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @11:23PM (#281307)

    Anyone who's taking this sort of direction over e-mail, and not walking over to/calling up the boss and double-checking this sort of thing, deserves to get fired for stupidity.

    Just don't videochat with your boss to double-check, because now that can be faked too. [educationaltechnology.ca]