A nationwide fraudulent unemployment benefits cyber scam has been making headlines for many months now and still continues to threaten employers and countless individuals throughout the United States.   Threat actors continue to exploit overwhelmed governmental agencies and are filing claims for benefits using the personal information of people who have not lost their jobs.  The false claims have been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars of fraudulent unemployment claims being paid to threat actors.  This fraud is a sharp reminder that sensitive personal information in the wrong hands can result in tremendous harm.  Employers should remain vigilant and alert their workforce, promptly challenge fraudulent claims, and check cyber-security practices and policies to help protect against this and other cyber threats.

It is estimated that nearly 53 million unemployment claims were filed during the few months of the coronavirus pandemic and the threat has continued into 2021.  Many state agencies, already understaffed and functioning with older technology and fraud detention protocols, were not prepared for the onslaught and have become tremendously overwhelmed.  The resulting delays and chaos in processing so many unemployment claims in such a short time has set the perfect stage for threat actors to take advantage.

Under normal circumstances, when the unemployment claim is filed, the agency will send  timely notice to the employer to provide the opportunity to protest the claim.  Typically the employer has ten days to protest.  However, during the pandemic, unemployment offices across the country have struggled to get the notices out to employers – taking months rather than days.  Consequently, employers are receiving the protest notices after the time has expired to protest the claim.  Most people learn they are affected when they get a notice from the state unemployment benefits office about their supposed application for benefits.  By then, however, the benefits usually have been paid to an account the criminals control.  Further, it is not clear given the magnitude of claims and impact on individuals whether in some instances agencies are paying even before they send the protest notice.
Continue Reading COVID-19 Unemployment Benefits Scams Continue Well Into the Pandemic

Every day all over the world, companies fall victim to cybersecurity attacks.  It’s nearly a constant these days.  Many of these attacks are preventable with the right amount of attention to detail in system setup and hardening.  The three common themes in postmortem examination of all of these attacks boil down to 1) human error; 2) configuration error; 3) failing to proactively defend.  In this series of six posts, we will dive into each attack’s anatomy, the attack vector, and the ways companies can attempt to avoid being victim to them.  In the last post, guest bloggers from G2 Insurance will walk through how insurance companies react to claims, what to watch out for in your policies, and appropriate coverage levels for cyber insurance based on their experience handling claims.

#1  Email Spoofing and Wire Fraud

This attack is essentially a wire instruction interception/redirection or wholly fake request for a transfer.  This is an event that comes up daily or at least weekly in any cybersecurity professional’s world.  This attack typically plays out with a threat actor masquerading as a legitimate authority within a company, typically someone in the C-suite or Director level.  To make it successful, the recipient of the wire transfer request has to believe it’s legitimately originating from one of those authoritative people.

One way attackers do this is using actual stolen credentials.  Despite the flood of data security breaches and database hacks, people unfortunately still use weak passwords and also re-use passwords.  We have seen dozens of instances of successful credential attacks where the attacker used publicly available database leak information to gain unauthorized access to corporate accounts.  The approach goes like this: an attacker harvests information regarding corporate leadership from various data sources about companies (LinkedIn, Dunn & Bradstreet, Bloomberg, Google Finance) and chooses a few people to target.  They then cross-reference those names to leaked credential databases, often times hosted on Darkweb sites, IRC chat rooms, or other forums dedicated to hacking.  If the attacker is able to find other accounts belonging to their targets that have been compromised and have a password, they can try that password, and tens of thousands of variations of it, to attack the corporate account of their victim.Continue Reading Top Five Most Common Cybersecurity Attacks and How to Prevent Them – Part 1: Email Spoofing and Wire Fraud