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How to Prevent CEO-Fraud with your Digital Footprint

| Author: Sebastiaan Bosman

CEO-fraud is the most common form of cyber-crime to target businesses worldwide. It’s now a 26-billion-dollar scam and continues to grow rapidly, with a 100% increase between 2018 and 2019. Creating awareness among employees is critical, but doesn’t offer full protection. What technical measures should you take to prevent a CEO-fraud attack at your organisation?


WHAT IS CEO-FRAUD?

CEO-fraud is an impersonation attack in which a criminal pretends to be a high-level executive or a third party, for example. They usually send an email to an employee telling them to transfer a sum of money to a specific account. An added time pressure, demand for confidentiality and authoritative “don’t ask questions, just do it”-message can persuade the employee to follow the instructions. 

Still, criminals will have to technically prepare the attack to increase their chances of success. This gives IT security professionals the opportunity to identify an upcoming attack and take preventive measures before the attack is launched. This blog describes a criminal’s general preparation techniques, and how digital footprint monitoring can minimise the impact. 

An organisation’s digital footprint is based on observable data solely. We define the digital footprint as a brand’s presence on the internet, be it in infrastructure, servers, online services, domains and applications, or on social media and appstore-channels, etc. Mapping the digital footprint allows IT specialists to see beyond the perimeter, make attack infrastructures and shadow IT visible, and identify and mitigate any vulnerabilities in their systems.

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