It’s no news that it has become increasingly important for companies to protect themselves against cyber-attacks during the past few years. Going the extra mile with security is now the bare minimum.
When we talk about CEO hacking, what comes to your mind?
There is a lot of confusion on what CEO hacking means. So, to be on the safe side and in case you were looking for a particular answer between the two, we’ll cover both.
What is CEO hacking fraud?
In its most common definition, it’s usually an email attack in which the perpetrators impersonate your company’s CEO. More than likely they will try to extract money from you or your company, claiming that it’s urgently needed for the CEO to conduct business.
Other types of attacks might ask you for confidential information about the company, or to reveal personal details about you or your staff. By disguising the situation as urgent, the attacker minimizes the chances of the reader going into too many details, or asking too many questions.
We must pay special attention to this type of attack.
Why?
Not long ago, attackers would spoof and use the same name as the company’s CEO but use a slightly different email address. Changing just a single letter could make it look close enough.
As an example, for chiefofficer@example.com an attacker might use chiefofficer@eaxmple.com. If you’re not looking close enough, that slight change might go unnoticed, making you think that the message is legit.
Easy to solve, right? Create awareness for employees to look into the email address in detail, block domains that have attempted to attack you, and problem solved. If only life were so easy.
Lately, attackers are spoofing both exact names and exact e-mail addresses. So even an email coming from chiefofficer@example.com spelled correctly, could be fake. We can now easily see why it’s moreimportant than ever to have extra security measures in place.
Things that you can do to make sure you don’t fall for spoofed email attacks:
What if attackers are constantly targeting your company’s CEO directly?
By now know that we are never 100% safe. And if we assuming that something could happen at any time, adopting a top-down strategy is always recommended. Why? It is your executives, after all, that manage the bulk of your company’s sensitive information.
The CEO of course, being at the top of that list.
What does it mean to protect your commander in chief, who holds the most valuable information?
A bit more than you would imagine.
CEOs are the prime targets for cyber-criminals, and they know it. 80% of a group of thousands of CEOs interviewed by PwC say they believe cyber threats are the biggest risk to their business, even more so than lack of skills or technological change.
If your CEO is a public or easily identifiable individual, you should avoid general-purpose or one-size-fits-all strategies. It’s important to recognize that higher-up executives have much different risk profiles than their colleagues.
Extra security aspects to have in mind for your CEO:
Lots of work is needed to keep the commander in chief protected. They might be the biggest strength of a company, but they could be the biggest weakness just as easily.
Make sure you are prepared.