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Cybercriminals are taking advantage of COVID-19 with a new email scam technique according to Fox News.
The FBI said that scammers are using Business Email compromise attacks, allowing criminals to conceal their activities.
The internet scam artists request a payment, wire transfer or gift card purchase that, if successful, funnels the money to a criminal organization.
These types of schemes resulted in $1.7 billion in worldwide losses.
“Cybercriminals then capitalize on this… to increase the likelihood of a successful business email compromise.”
“The webmail did not sync to the desktop application and went unnoticed by the victim company, which only observed auto-forwarding rules on the desktop client.”
FBI said, “In this type of scheme, a company’s human resources or payroll department receives an email appearing to be from an employee requesting to update their direct deposit information for the current pay period.”
From Fox News:
The news was first reported by Bleeping Computer.
Business email schemes resulted in more than $1.7 billion in worldwide losses, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2019.
In the recent cases cited by the FBI, the vulnerability occurs because the client’s forwarding rules “often do not sync with the desktop client” limiting cybersecurity professionals’ ability to track criminal activity, the FBI said.
In August, cybercriminals created auto-forwarding email rules on the recently upgraded web client of a U.S.-based medical equipment company.
