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The Book of the Week is “The Secret to Cybersecurity, A Simple Plan to Protect Your Family and Business From Cybercrime” by Scott E. Augenbaum, published in 2019.
This short volume gave many examples of how lax cybersecurity and naive users can cause huge financial losses, and how to use an ounce of prevention. The author is a retired FBI agent who specialized in investigating cybercrime.
The author wrote that anti-virus software can actually protect users ONLY about a third of the time, as malware developers’ software is coming up with a hundred thousand new strains of harmful programs, EVERY DAY.
The author often found himself spinning his wheels and had to tell the victims he couldn’t help them because when a hacker empties someone’s bank account, mostly likely: the perpetrator will never be arrested or go to jail, and the stolen money will never be recovered.
The web-hosting companies of cybercriminals, are mostly registered in West Africa, where they create phony websites with phony names and addresses. They send their ill-gotten money to overseas bank accounts, in countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States.
The Business Email Compromise occurs when, say, a top executive’s poorly trained assistant falls for a spoofed email message, requesting that money unwittingly be sent to Hong Kong or China. The (usually stressed and distracted) assistant sends the money without communicating with the boss [who’s out of town] or other employees. “Company X had a $10 million cyber-liability insurance policy. Unfortunately, it was told this type of fraud wasn’t covered.”
The author advised against paying the ransomware-criminals, because about a quarter of the time, the culprits take the ransom and still do not decrypt the victim’s data. Besides, paying them only emboldens them to target more suckers. The author recommended backing up valuable data on an external computer drive so that the victims can have access to the kidnapped data without having to to pay the ransom.
In the United States, there is also an extremely disturbing trend afoot, whereby medical offices are replacing their employees with answering services that force patients to leave a message. The patients can’t get a live person on the phone. Naive patients leave messages fraught with personal information that the answering service will sell to who knows whom, unbeknownst to the medical office. After a barrage of lawsuits, the medical offices might start to hire people again! That might take a couple of decades. Good luck with that, all.
Read the book to learn about many other kinds of cyber-fraud cases and how to avoid becoming a victim.