Whaling Imposter

Email impostor trickiness lures HR staff to change ADP payroll direct deposits In these strange economic times, impostors have identified an overworked company department. With Human Resource (HR) departments handling a new onslaught of employee concerns and issues, staffing changes, and remote work policies, email imposters have inserted themselves stealthily into their world. And, they […]

“You’re Fired!” Fake Termination Emails Proliferate in this Climate of Job Insecurity It was only a matter of time. Fresh off their latest exploits at trying to phish for sensitive financial account information, scammers have set their sights on people’s actual jobs. With jobless claims now topping 30 million and the unemployment rate headed for […]

Right Email, Wrong Recipient. No Problem. Recall The company travel agent, Leah, sometimes gets some really insightful inside information about her client company – sent to her accidentally. Fortunately, she is a trusted outside contractor and politely replies to her client, “I think you did not intend to send this to me.”

Whale Eats Shark. Whale Eats Nurse. Whale Eats $1.2mm Killer whales occasionally hunt sharks. When they do, it can be ugly. In a recent whaling attack (This is not a nature article. We are referring to the very tricky type of email “spear-phishing” impostor email attack), the poser sent an email to one of the […]

Fake Facebook and Email Wow! What a beautiful vacation that friend of a friend posted in their Facebook account. It looks like the perfect family vacation; all smiles, all sun, some commentary about the perfect spot…

Whaling is Flourishing, A $5 Billion Hacker Lottery Harpooning whales is (in most of the world) a thing of the past. This is good for the kind-hearted. But in the cyber world, harpooning “whales” is a thriving and fantastically profitable criminal profession.

Imposter Email Lures White House Staff Email Prankster Threatens National Security Why was the newly minted White House communications director, Scaramucci, fired? We don’t know for sure. But an examination of his emails would have shown that he spent the weekend responding to spear phishing emails purported to be sent from Reince Preibus, former White […]

$100 Million IT Budget May Not Secure “The Human Factor” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has joined a new club along with the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Citigroup. Each has fallen victim to an email prankster who, posing as a colleague or friend, sent email messages to them and tricked them into responding. […]

Cyber pirates have found easy prey in real estate brokers, title agents and estate attorneys. Their emails are a treasure trove of information about pending transactions involving large wire transfers. Real estate buyers, eager to close the deal, blindly trust the email they receive and the advisors with whom they correspond.

What do United Airlines and footballer David Beckham have in common? Disastrous leaked emails. In these recent cases, the leaked emails appear to be legitimate, though Beckham claims some of the leaked emails were “doctored.” But how do we know that leaked email messages discussed in news stories and tabloid columns are actually authentic?