You may or may not have heard the news last week that a Snapchat HR employee fell for a phishing email in which a cyber criminal impersonated Snapchat’s CEO asking for employee payroll information. Worryingly, the employee was unable to recognise that this was a scam and gave the criminals the payroll information of present and former employees.
As no customer details were disclosed we knew that this wouldn’t be a huge story, yet as Snapchat is one of the most popular and wide spread apps on the market, it was a relatively safe bet to assume this would be written about. So we shared the story with our clients and Jonathan Sander, VP of Product Strategy at Lieberman Software came back with a great comment explaining that “the fact that Snapchat got snagged with this shows that being young, cool, and high tech doesn’t protect you from being a phishing target” and even millennials with their tech savviness will not be putting cybercriminals out of the phishing business.
Jonathan’s interesting comments achieved coverage in the Guardian, Computer Business Review, International Business Times and three other publications. Proofpoint also provided comments on the story which outlined just how sophisticated phishing attacks have become that even with training, people can still be fooled. These achieved coverage in Tech Week Europe and Information Security Buzz.
At Eskenzi we also get tens of phishing emails each day and we also received emails impersonating our CEO asking us to transfer money. Luckily, we were able to spot the scam however if we had fallen for it, it could have been detrimental to our agency. So while the Snapchat story resulted in good coverage for our clients we urge businesses to provide appropriate and ongoing training on how to spot even the most sophisticated attempts and plead everyone to be alert to suspicious emails.
