Payment attackers update their tactics
A cybersecurity study by payment messaging giant Swift shows that fraudsters have shifted to office hours, and ask for smaller amounts to fly under the radar.
When cyber attackers have penetrated a target bank, they increasingly continue to work silently for weeks or months before they perform their attack, to learn behaviors and patterns. This is one of the conclusions in a study by Swift, “Three years on from Bangladesh: tackling the adversaries”, picked up by The Global Treasurer.
The Swift report itself can be directly downloaded here in its entirety.
Not just dollars
80 percent of the fraudulent transactions across the world aim to move the money to accounts in South East Asia. 70 percent of the attempted thefts are in US dollars, but the use of European currencies is on the rise.
While it used to be that many attacks took place off office hours, they are now increasingly taking place during the day when they can blend more discretely with the bulk of clean payments.
Ask for less
The size of the typical attempted transaction has gone down remarkably. The report also notes that the overwhelming part of the investigated shady transactions took place between pairs of target and beneficiary banks (“corridors”) that had not been used for at least two years.