Fake Invoice Email Scams and Office 365

The fake invoice scam has been impacting an unbelievable amount of businesses lately costing £000’s every day.

Every other day there is a business hit with this type of attack and losing money to the bad guys. There are two ways this can happen. Either the attacker is impersonating one of your colleague or a supplier. The second way is your colleague’s or supplier’s email account got compromised. When the email account gets compromised they create a custom rule to forward all the emails from a certain sender to another email outside the organisation so that the recipient never sees them. In both cases, the attacker requests the funds to be transferred into a different bank than the normal bank. How to combat this?

First and foremost is the business process. Whenever there is a request to transfer funds to a new bank the sender should verify the bank details by calling the recipient. The simple and effective process would save millions of pounds to many UK businesses. We are assuming you are using Office 365 and a few other Office 365 technical measures that can help the recipient end are:

• Warn users of the external emails
• Create alerts when the forwarding rules are created
• Enforce 2-factor authentication
• Enable Anti-spoofing
• Educate your employees

These measures may sound rudimentary but there is a surprisingly large number of businesses that don’t have these in place and been a victim of this scam.

It is also a really good idea to consider going through the Cyber Essentials Certification that will ensure you have basic security controls in place before this happens to you.

We don't want this happening to your business. If you need any further help please reach out.