Osterman Research (2015) cited a number of example of cybersecurity issues common today. An attorney in the greater San Diego area opened an attachment in a phishing email that he thought was sent to him by the US Postal Service. The attachment installed malware on his computer, and shortly thereafter he found that $289,000 had been transferred from his firm account to a bank in China. An email attack on Fazio Mechanical, an HVAC contractor in Sharpsburg, VA, was able to penetrate the organizational email defenses and infected at least one computer with a variant of the ZeuS banking Trojan. About two months later, that infiltration was used in the attack on Target Corporation that resulted in the breach of information for approximately 110 million customers.
A law firm in Charlotte, NC transferred $387,000 to a bank in Virginia Beach, VA after it closed a deal. Shortly thereafter, cybercriminals transferred most of this amount to the law firm bank in Charlotte, which transferred the funds to a bank in New York and then to a bank in Moscow. The victim organization believes it had been infected with keystroke logging software from a phishing email that captured all of the critical information necessary to initiate the wire transfer. These are all examples of the types of the phishing and malware threats that are becoming more commonplace as cybercriminals become more adept, stealthier, and more able to penetrate corporate security defenses. The consequences of even a single such attack can be enormous, resulting in the potential loss of millions of dollars from corporate financial accounts, the loss of sensitive customer data, the loss of intellectual property like trade secrets or marketing plans, and possibly the dissolution of a business.
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