In mid-October, the municipal offices of the city of Ocala, Florida, received a legitimate invoice from a construction company for nearly three-quarters of $1 million, a partial payment for construction of a new terminal at the Ocala International Airport. When the city paid the invoice, however, the money went into the coffers of criminals overseas.
A massive bank hack? No. The criminals had impersonated the construction company nearly a month earlier and managed to convince a city employee to change the bank to which funds were paid, according to a report in the Ocala StarBanner. The $742,000 windfall for the criminals came after the legitimate company issued the invoice, and when the construction company notified the city five days later on Oct. 22, the money was gone.
"We take our city's cyber security seriously and employees participate in mandatory trainings to arm them with the skills needed to identify and report these sophisticated campaigns," Ashley Dobbs, Ocala's marketing and communication manager, told the newspaper. "While we can't change this outcome, we will continue to update and refine our cyber security systems and trainings to minimize future impacts."
While ransomware continues to garner attention for its sheer disruptive power, businesses and government organizations continue to lose billions of dollars to impersonators who insert themselves into the victims' financial workflow. Known most often as business e-mail compromise (BEC), the scam targets critical employees with phishing e-mails that specifically request they change the bank information for a particular vendor. When the company or o ..
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