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This happened to someone I know with a reasonably well-run but not super technical small business. Someone compromised the email account of their accounts recei
by avalys 5y ago
This happened to someone I know with a reasonably well-run but not super technical small business. Someone compromised the email account of their accounts receivable person, silently monitored it for a while, and then used it to send a few strategic requests to change the payment account. By the time my friend noticed and politely asked their customers (mid-size businesses all) “Why haven’t you paid this $50,000 bill?”, the hackers had made off with a few hundred thousand - a big deal to my friend, but not so much to law enforcement, who pretty much shrugged and said “Sucks to be you.”
Luckily, several of those customers theoretically had policies against changing payment directives without phone confirmation, which were not followed, so they are taking some shared responsibility for this.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoI thought cyber insurance was a scam for awhile, but our beezly underwritten policy specifically covers us up to 100k of exactly this scenario. I can recommend their portal/system so far, maybe it’s shit, I don’t think so though.
- geoduck14 5y agoI'm surprised the types of things you can get insurance for. I know one company that got hacked and data (no money) was exposed. There was an insurance pay out (to the company) to pay for "fixing the digital infrastructure". This is like saying: If you leave the door to your house open, and someone robs you, we will pay to show you how to lock your front door.
- woleium 5y agoexcept now imagine the same thing, only you are a blind man with no arms or legs.
- forinti 5y agoThere's a story about when Robert MacNamara arrived at Ford. Accounting was in such disarray that they weighed their invoices and only checked them if X pounds was more than Y dollars. That must have been a scammer's paradise.
- aerostable_slug 5y agoI worked for a megacorp and made friends with a guy who worked in the underground data centers at HQ. He'd end up with spare equipment and ask I wanted it to play with. He once offered me (with no witnesses) a check writing machine that was still loaded with a spool of thousands of blank corporate checks. Knowing what would be considered a rounding error with the billing & accounting systems there, I probably could have made off with a fair amount of loot. It still surprises me to this day that he didn't really realize what he had and what it could do, but then again he didn't get a lot of sunlight, so...
- woleium 5y agomaybe he was smarter than you give him credit for. He didn't directly ask you to collude in fraud, but he got as close as he could without implication.