Google and Facebook have confirmed that they fell victim to an alleged $100m (\u00a377m) scam.<\/p>\n
In March, it was reported that a Lithuanian man had been charged over an email phishing attack against “two US-based internet companies” who were not named at the time.<\/p>\n
They had allegedly been tricked into wiring more than $100m to the alleged scammer’s bank accounts.<\/p>\n
On 27 April, Fortune reported that the two victims were Facebook and Google.<\/p>\n
The man accused of being behind the scam, Evaldas Rimasauskas, 48, allegedly posed as an Asia-based manufacturer and deceived the companies from at least 2013 until 2015.<\/p>\n
“Fraudulent phishing emails were sent to employees and agents of the victim companies, which regularly conducted multimillion-dollar transactions with [the Asian] company,” the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said in March.<\/p>\n
These emails purported to be from employees of the Asia-based firm, the DOJ alleged, and were sent from email accounts designed to look like they had come from the company, but in fact had not.<\/p>\n
The DOJ also accused Mr Rimasauskas of forging invoices, contracts and letters “that falsely appeared to have been executed and signed by executives and agents of the victim companies”.<\/p>\n
“We detected this fraud against our vendor management team and promptly alerted the authorities,” a spokeswoman for Google said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“We recouped the funds and we’re pleased this matter is resolved.”<\/p>\n
However, the firm did not reveal how much money it had transferred and recouped.<\/p>\n
Nor did Facebook – but a spokeswoman said: “Facebook recovered the bulk of the funds shortly after the incident and has been cooperating with law enforcement in its investigation.”<\/p>\n
Big firms targeted
\n“Sometimes staff [at large firms] think that they are defended, that security isn’t part of their job,” said James Maude at cyber-security firm Avecto, commenting on the phishing threat facing big companies.<\/p>\n
“But people are part of the best security you can have – that’s why you have to train them.”<\/p>\n
He also told the BBC that Avecto’s clients have recounted phishing attempts that used senior staff’s hacked email accounts to convince employees that a request to wire out money was genuine.<\/p>\n
The sophistication of phishing scams has increased lately, according to a recent Europol report.<\/p>\n
“CEO fraud” – in which executives are impersonated by the scammer – was a particular worry.<\/p>\n
“The request is usually time-sensitive and often coincides with the close of business hours to make verification of the request difficult,” the report explained.<\/p>\n
“Such attacks often take advantage of publicly reported events such as mergers, where there may be some degree of internal flux and uncertainty.”<\/p>\n
In order to avoid succumbing to such fraud, firms are advised to carefully verify new payment requests before authorising them.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Google and Facebook have confirmed that they fell victim to an alleged $100m (\u00a377m) scam. In March, it was reported that a Lithuanian man had been charged over an email phishing attack against “two US-based internet companies” who were not named at the time. They had allegedly been tricked into wiring more than $100m to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":314854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[339,225],"class_list":["post-314853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-facebook","tag-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=314853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=314853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=314853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=314853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}