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One of Europe's Biggest Companies Loses 40 Million Euros In Online Scam (softpedia.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the business-email-compromise dept.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Softpedia: Leoni AG, Europe's biggest manufacturer of wires and electrical cables and the fourth-largest vendor in the world, announced it lost 40 million euros ($44.6 million) following an online scam that tricked one of its financial officers into transferring funds to the wrong bank account. A subsequent investigation revealed that attackers had scouted the company's network and procedures, and identified a weak spot to attack. According to authorities, a young woman working as CFO at Leoni's Bistrita factory in Romania was the target of the scam, when she received an email spoofed to look like it came from one of the company's top German executives asking her to transfer funds to a bank account. According to unconfirmed information, the money stolen from Leoni's Bistrita branch ended up in bank accounts in the Czech Republic. The FBI says this type of attack is known as CEO fraud, whaling, or BEC (Business Email Compromise), and has defrauded companies around the world of over $3 billion since October 2013.

5 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Encryption and Digital Signatures by The+Other+White+Meat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If they had used PKI Encryption and Digital Signatures, technology that has been available for DECADES, they could have authenticated that message properly and prevented spoofing. To be performing transfers based on unauthenticated email is absurd.

    --

    --- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
    1. Re:Encryption and Digital Signatures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Surely she should at least have called him on the phone to confirm the request?

    2. Re:Encryption and Digital Signatures by dbIII · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The only thing stopping me was balls not made of steel

      I'd say you were also stopped by an upbringing that wasn't completely worthless and didn't turn you into a sociopath.

    3. Re:Encryption and Digital Signatures by gsslay · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Your company is just ripe for this kind of scam, then.

      This is why companies with any sense, and decent financial auditing, has a non-negotiable, set procedure for moving money around. Especially when dealing with large sums like 40 million Euro. All that tedious form filling, signing and authorising is not done just to give the admin staff additional work, and a sense of power. It's to prevent the company being scammed.

  2. IT Contractors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All those contractors you outsourced to are selling your internal procedures for scams like this.