Mortgage, real estate professionals warned about cyber threat

Mortgage and real estate professionals may be in the sights of a group of Nigerian cyber criminals who are trying to steal company funds.

CNN reports that the group, called London Blue, have obtained a list of the email addresses of around 50,000 executives, including 35,000 chief financial officers, across 80 countries. Some are from banks and mortgage companies.

According to Mastercard company NuData Security, the scammers’ access to the direct email addresses of CFOs means that they can orchestrate targeted attacks requesting transfers of funds.

These kind of attacks are known as business email compromise campaigns (BEC) and the FBI says companies have lost an estimated $12 billion over the past 5 years.

“Banks, mortgage lenders and other financial corporations need to remain extremely vigilant to this kind of activity,” said Ryan Wilk, VP of customer success for NuData Security. “BEC fraud can be incredibly difficult to spot as these hackers will take the time to make their attempts as accurate as possible using social engineering – learning job titles and names of key decision makers with tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter.”

Wilk adds that CFOs and other potential targets of this campaign should use extreme caution when clicking on unsolicited email links and should flag the email with the decision maker it allegedly came from if it seems in any way unusual.