Guarding Against Social Engineering Fraud: Re-examining a Global Problem
White paper by Chubb, PaymentWorks and Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani, LLP, hones in on the risk inherent in manual vendor onboarding and management processes. Free Download.
Even with protections put in place by internal IT departments or outside partners, email remains an unsecured and unreliable technology capable of being hacked, altered and manipulated.
Email has become an indispensable tool for global businesses, improving efficiency by facilitating nearly instantaneous communication and expediting vital actions about sales, payments and other critical business activities. An estimated 300 billion email messages are exchanged every day by businesses and individuals.1 While its speed and ease of access have made email routine and universally accepted, these benefits mask the inherent vulnerability of email and often lull well-intentioned employees into a false sense of security. In reality, even with protections put in place by internal IT departments or outside partners, email remains an unsecured and unreliable technology capable of being hacked, altered and manipulated. The FBI estimates that cyber criminals stole more than $28 billion through email fraud from 2016-2020, with an average loss per incident of more than $150,000.2 In addition, since the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020, cyber security risks have increased for organizations, as many employees have shifted to working from home over less-secure wi-fi networks. At the same time, to maintain their revenue, many businesses have adopted or increased their use of e-commerce and electronic transactions with their partners and customers. When combined, these factors have created an even busier environment for cyber criminals to exploit email for fraudulent activities.
