MailGuard Blog

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are currently hot property, on the wish and hit lists of just about every company on the planet.

Another day, another red-faced exec wondering how his company just managed to get scammed out of thousands of dollars. Embarrassing? Yes. Uncommon? No.

It’s officially silly (shopping) season. Inboxes around the world are starting to fill up with crazy hot sales, festive deals, and year-end promotions.

Shady and shifty or just another regular Jo? Much like Ted Bundy was considered a charismatic guy, you can never be too sure of the biggest personnel threats to your organisation. Don’t we always see in the news that it’s Susan the lovely office manager who seems to be the one channeling company funds into her own accounts? 

“How did I fall for that?”

Released last week, Gemalto’s Breach Level Index found that over 4.5 billion data records were breached in the first half of this year - up 1,751% from the same time last year. That translates to 291 data records being breached per second in the first half of 2018.

What is cybersecurity?
If you walked around your office and asked people that question, what sort of answers do you think, you’d get?

The image many businesspeople have of cybercrime is a teenager with a grubby hoody hunched over a laptop hammering code into a flickering screen that’s like something out of The Matrix. The imaginary teen finds a backdoor into a bank’s server admin page, and typing like fury beats the computer in a showdown of quick-draw typing.

"Raise the topic of cybersecurity with any board of directors. They would all probably agree it’s a very important issue, but it’s rare that they would all agree what to do about it. Just asking a few pointed questions can create a lot of energy:
How well prepared are you for a sophisticated cyber attack this afternoon?”

I had a group of friends over for dinner a couple of weeks ago, one of whom is a doctor. She arrived late and apologised, saying that she’d been stuck late at work because the clinic computer system was hacked and her appointment schedule was all messed up.

The term “imitation game” comes from a paper Alan Turing wrote in 1960 called Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Turing posed the question "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"
While machines are now beginning to answer Turing’s question in the affirmative, the most dangerous copycats in the cyber-world are still humans.

• Phishing
• Brandjacking
• CEO fraud

All these kinds of cybercrime are perpetrated using email as their primary vector.

Every business is constantly sending and receiving emails, it’s part of the background noise of everyday work, so it’s a powerful tool for criminals who want to slip under the wire and attack a company from the inside out.

Does defeating cybercriminals mean we need to try thinking like they do?

The kind of people who commit cybercrime aren’t CEO material. They aren’t even necessarily the I.T. whiz or hacker type; cybercrime doesn’t require a serious technical skill set. The crooks behind online fraud attacks are using technology, certainly, but they are consumers, not experts.

You have your solicitor look over contracts before they’re signed.
Your accountant examines your books to find any irregularities.
There are checks and balances in place to monitor purchases, invoicing, payroll and transactions of every kind.
You’re confident that your company’s financial integrity is well protected, but what about the online realm?

There’s a lot about online crime that’s ambiguous and confusing, but the damage it’s doing is all too clear. Recent research figures released by the FBI and reports from independent cybersecurity experts estimate that the damage bill from cybercrime in 2018 will reach more than US$12 billion dollars.