Good business briefing this morning about fraud and businesses. I learned a few new things today and it’s always useful to be reminded about the ones you haven’t seen for a while, if people are still doing them. Flavour of the month (apparently) is the late Friday afternoon email that purports to be from the CEO or other senior management asking the accounts department to transfer a sum of money in a hurry to secure a particular contract or similar. You won’t need to be the brain of Britain to realise (i) it doesn’t come from the CEO and (ii) the destination bank account has nothing to do with any legitimate contract… You might think no one in your business would fall for it but, if it’s worth people’s while doing it, enough people must be being fooled. I’m not surprised to hear that the old Section 419 fraud is still going strong (history bit, the fraud is named after a part of the Nigerian penal code) where someone needs your bank account to move untold wealth out of another country and you get to keep the bulk of it. The emails appeal to people’s greed and, once again, enough people fall for it. The only safe computer is one that doesn’t connect in any way with the outside world and you won’t be at all surprised to hear that computer and internet fraud is on the up. Quick rule of thumb: hover over the email address you can see and it will show you the underlying “real” address. If it doesn’t look like an account your bank would use it’s probably not for real. Some borderline ones I’ve spotted spoil it for themselves by sending several emails to the same account in short succession thereby confirming my suspicions. A particularly pernicious threat is ransomware, whereby part of your disk drive gets encrypted and the key is only released on payment of some sum of money, often in untraceable bitcoins. Some good, sensible precautions can be taken. A good firewall and antivirus software, preferably the paid for version rather than the free one if you’ve got your livelihood to protect, and robust backup procedures, preferably offsite or cloud based if you can to stop cross-contamination. You don’t need to get totally paranoid about security, just slightly will do… ]]>