Cyber thieves stole nearly $215 million from businesses in the last 14 months using email scams. Once a high level exec has his or her email compromised, the bad guys lurk, learn the schedules, learn the business, learn the business trips, and take advantage of scenarios where it is most opportune to email a trusted colleague or financial personnel to move money via wire-transfer.
The CSO website has some scenarios of the attack to raise awareness for employees. Also the full Krebs article is here in regards to the Business Spear Phishing.
I love this graphic that Brian Krebs put together. Some things that the graphic doesn’t cover, is home stability. If your email is compromised, there can be disruption of home conveniences such as cancelling trash pickup, turning the water, Internet/Phone/Cable, and electricity off, or many other malicious problems.
Some new PCs, preloaded with Windows 8.1, try to have you set up and have a login with your live.com account, with admin access to your own computer. For some, there is a direct correlation between the above graphic and this one:
