Outfitter Email Hack
Contributors to this thread:Bears
From: Stubbleduck
15-Mar-16
For Manitoba and perhaps others, outfitters who may read this you might keep a close eye on your website and access thereto especially with regard to clients making deposit payments and communicating using the email address on the website. My outfitter had his account hacked by a fairly sophisticated attack which was apparently able to convince several clients, including me, to send deposit / payment checks to a phoney address. I was able to cancell payment on the deposit check before it cleared. As I said this was a well designed attack, I'm reasonably competent at computer operations and I got stung, that is now under investigation by the appropriate Provincial officials.
From: Stubbleduck
15-Mar-16
It will be interesting to see how seriously the Canadian officials pursue this case. While it took a reasonably sophisticated attack to compromise this outfitters account it certainly was not a "State of the art" attack. The nature of Outfitter / Client relations have, in my experience, been quite trusting. It would be unfortunate to see this level of trust decline but I fear, in the absence of serious pursuit of the vandals, that will occur.
From: Bou'bound
16-Mar-16
bad guys get up all over the world every day focused on nothing other than figuring out ways to steal personal information, money, and compromise corporate systems. there are as many, if not more, of them at work than there are the good guys who are charged with staying one step ahead of them. I don't think a breech of a small businesses account / system will get any attention from the government given what they are facing elsewhere. nobody is safe anywhere from this new breed of criminal and unlike other crime it is constantly evolving into something more complex each day.
From: WoodMoose
16-Mar-16
phishing has gotten very sophisticated, as Pat mentioned - read news reports - several companies have sent W2s to hackers "impersonating" CFOs and other financial folks within an organization.
the new "bank robber" of old,,,,,
From: SteveB
02-Apr-16
I agree with Pat completely. It gets far worse that this.....the newest "ransome" virus is getting past sophisticated firewalls and taking down corporate networks of all sizes. All it takes is anyone who clicks a link in an innocent looking email and it seems nothing has happened.... Until it crawls the network encrypting all data. Then it locks it down and renders your network useless until you pay them using bitcoin and is virtually untraceable . Being in the IT business, we deal with this stuff every day. The govt doesn't have enough resources to deal with the "small" stuff. Sad but true.