NEW YORK – The e-mail looked legitimate, so Danielle Radin clicked on the link it contained, expecting to have her products included in a holiday gift guide.
“I instantly regretted it,” says Radin, owner of Mantra Magnets, a website that sells wellness products. “It took me to some random website that looked like those pop-ups telling you that you’ve won the lottery.”
Within days of that click three weeks ago, Radin began getting notifications that people in Ecuador, China and elsewhere were trying to access her e-mail account. She wasn’t surprised; she knew her San Diego-based small business had been the target of a phishing scam.
While cybercriminals strike at any time of the year, they’re particularly active during the holiday and income-tax filing seasons when computer users expect to see more e-mails — and scammers are increasingly targeting individual small businesses with phishing scams, sending messages that look legitimate but do harm instead. An unsuspecting owner or employee clicks on a link or attachment and like Radin finds that malicious software has invaded their PCs.
Cybersecurity experts find that criminals who used to blanket thousands of computer users in hopes of fooling a handful have refined their methods. Scammers find small businesses through websites and social media sites and by combing e-mail address books. They also mine personal data from breaches at retailers and other large companies. Then, using a process called social engineering, they construct e-mails that increasingly look realistic, as if they come from a boss, colleague, friend, potential client or vendor, a bank or even the IRS.
“In the last year or two they’ve been running more professional campaigns,” says Perry Toone, owner of Thexyz, an e-mail service provider based in Toronto. “It can take a couple of minutes for me to determine that they’re phishing scams. That tells me they’re doing a very good job.”
Radin believes the scammers found her through her website or a blog. Like many small businesses, she has an e-mail address on her site, and the scammers figured out that she might be interested in selling via a holiday gift guide. But finding a target is one thing; the scam won’t work unless it tricks an e-mail recipient into clicking. Even those who are tech savvy can sometimes let their guard down. Radin was duped even though she’s the author of “Everyone’s Been Hacked,” a book sold online.
Often a scam succeeds because there’s just a shred of doubt in a computer user — the e-mail is realistic enough that an owner or employee feels they need to read it. Sometimes a staffer clicks out of fear or a sense of responsibility, says Rahul Telang, a professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.
“It might not sound very personal, but you have an idea that you should go ahead — you feel like the e-mail is coming from the boss,” he says.
Computer users may not be looking as closely as they should at an e-mail — there can be subtle signs that a message is trouble. Terry Cole, owner of Cole Informatics, a company whose work includes cybersecurity, recalls getting an e-mail that seemed to be from a colleague. He was one of several people in the industry to receive it.
“It said that this colleague had sent me a secure private message that was ready for me to read and included a link to click. This was absolutely consistent with my normal experiences communicating with him,” says Cole, whose company is in Parsons, Tenn.
The holidays provide scammers with extra opportunities: e-mailed greeting cards, package shipment notices, offers of discounts — all of them perfectly plausible communications that can seem personalized. Cybercriminals also seek personal information from owners and employees under the guise of needing them to create a W-2 or 1099 tax form; at this time of year, business owners’ thoughts are turning to taxes.
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December 09, 2019 at 03:01AM
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Holidays bring phishing scam surge aimed at small business - Minneapolis Star Tribune
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