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I suspect there's a lot more successful attack that resulted in monetary loss than meets the media. When I was at a venture-funded startup back in 2011, we had
by sdneirf 10y ago
I suspect there's a lot more successful attack that resulted in monetary loss than meets the media. When I was at a venture-funded startup back in 2011, we had just raised $15M and on a fri late afternoon, our CFO received an email that looked like it came from our bank. He clicked on it and was immediately phished. Between 4-5pm they transferred $3M out of the account in multiple chunks. The company hasn't set up alerts and the bank, which was a regional one, did not have sophisticated filters to catch them. Long story short, it quickly went Dubai, Hong Kong and London. By the time Mon comes around, some of the money has been re-tranferred again to Asia and Eastern Europe.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- msellout 10y agoDid you recover any money? How difficult was the process?
- sdneirf 10y agoSuper difficult. We recovered 40% from banks who were willing to look at our evidence. Turns out there was no international banking law that deals with stuff like this. Banks basically make their own decision whether who's right/wrong. The banks in Dubai and Far East basically told us to pound sand. We ended up threatening to sue our regional bank. They covered 20%. So we ended up losing 40%. The funny thing was FBI was involved. You'd think these guys are hot to trot. The guy we spoke to basically sounded like a local policeman whom you just told you lost your bike. "Oh yeah, we are tracking down leads". Net net, don't hire dumb people who can easily get phished. Once the money is gone, it almost always never come back. We counted ourselves lucky that we only lost 40% instead of 100% which is common from what we learned.
- sdneirf 10y agoI should probably write a longer post on this and just throw it up. Sounds like people might be interested in learning about the experience.