If your inbox is a daily battle between real company communications and fraud imposters, you’re not alone.
In the past year alone MailGuard has seen a 400% spike in fraud email attacks impersonating Telstra, Origin Energy, ANZ, EnergyAustralia, Westpac and government bodies ATO, ASIC, ACCC, to name a few.
Major Australian brands are fighting a daily battle to protect themselves from the reputational and financial costs of cybercriminal impersonators.
The fraudsters’ tactics are growing in frequency and sophistication. In fact, cybercriminals have a better strike rate than most marketers.
Whether they’re tricking people into handing over money or valuable information, it’s not just the victims who are losing out.
The battle to distinguish legitimate emails from fake is becoming harder.
Google says the overall success rate for email fraud is 45%, meaning nearly half the people who receive a scam or fraud email fall for it.
This creates a huge problem for companies whose names are hijacked by cybercriminals to aid a deception.
The risk is not just reputational. Take Origin Energy, for example, which is regularly impersonated in large-scale malware deliveries, disguised as customer invoices. Origin has been mimicked in four highly sophisticated, large-scale attacks in recent months.
This creates a raft of problems – and potential costs – for the energy retailer.
Consider the impacts of an enormous fake-invoice email inundation, using Origin’s trusted brand to succeed. Here are just some of the ramifications:
US fraud protection expert Estelle Derouet succinctly sums up the cost of reputational damage:
“If your brand reputation is damaged by email fraud, customers won’t open your emails and mailbox providers may not deliver your messages to the inbox. When that happens, you’ve lost a revenue opportunity—both now and in the future.”
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, has called for a ‘digital Geneva Convention’ in response to the increased frequency and scale of cyber attacks.
“The past year has witnessed not just the growth of cybercrime, but a proliferation in cyber attacks that is both new and disconcerting. This has included not only cyber-attacks mounted for financial gain, but new nation-state attacks as well,” Smith says.
“The bad news starts with the fact that 74 percent of the world’s businesses expect to be hacked each year. The estimated economic loss of cybercrime is estimated to reach $3 trillion by 2020. Yet as these costs continue to climb, the financial damage is overshadowed by new and broadening risks.” Smith proposes six ideas central to his proposed digital Geneva Convention:
Here are some steps your brand can take to defend against the damage caused by online imposters:
Cyber scams will continue to grow and gain sophistication. The best brands acknowledge this and adjust accordingly.
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