Ransomware is a leading risk for professional service firms in 2021 – Aon’s Cyber Solutions Group statistics show that ransomware attacks have increased 486% in two years.

• Attackers are very sophisticated
  • They employ behavioral psychologists
  • They employ professional translators
  • They do their research and know:
    • You (they have your name, email address, and photograph)
    • Your clients
    • Your expertise, experience, and specialty
    • Personal information shared on social media (from where you live, to your dog’s name, including information leaked on the dark web, including SSN’s)
    • Your colleagues
    • Your position in your organization – who you report to and who reports to you
    • Your vacation schedule and where you go
      
• Attackers have all the information they need to
  • Craft convincing messages
  • Impersonate you to someone else (e.g., a client)
  • Impersonate one of your clients or vendors to you
  • Convincingly emulate a prospective client
    
• The pandemic and subsequent shift to remote working environments has given the attackers new opportunities to exploit issues with carefully crafted messages
• Statistically, attackers need to send only 20 messages to have a high chance that at least one person will click a link or open an attachment, potentially releasing malware into your systems
• You and your employees are the “gatekeepers”
  • When they get past you, everything else is technology and they are very, very good at technology
  • The attackers only need to be lucky once
  • Your best defense is training the gatekeepers, often and repetitively
    

What can you do?

• Be vigilant – look out for spoofed emails and names that are not quite right
• Think twice before opening documents or clicking on links
• Double-check changed instructions using “out of band” communication with parties to a transaction
• If you think you have a problem, tell someone – the sooner the better
• Establish and follow protocols – changes and exceptions are always red flags

Contact

To discuss any of the topics raised in this article, please contact Tom Ricketts.

Tom Ricketts
Senior Vice President and Cyber Risk Leader
New York