This #CyberAware month, Two RH-ISAC Members Offer Space for USSS/FBI BEC Workshops

In the true spirit of information sharing and in support of the National Cyber Security Awareness Month, two RH-ISAC members, JOANN Stores and Starbucks, offered their space and, more importantly, valuable staff time in support of the US Secret Service’s (USSS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) educational effort on Business Email Compromise (BEC) the broad business community. BEC has become a significant threat to U.S. businesses and individuals. Since October 2013, the FBI has identified victims from 131 countries and a global monetary exposure of more than $5 billion as a result of BEC fraud.

In the two days combined, we educated more than 200 businesses local to Seattle and Akron about the threats and to offer some security measures to help prevent BEC. Many of the solutions were ones already familiar to RH-ISAC members: authenticate the request outside of email as rules may have been compromised and establish processes that require multiple approvals for wiring requests. The USSS and FBI also stressed that if BEC occurs, the first step is to call the bank to stop the transfer. The second is to reach out to local USSS and FBI offices to report the incident or report it via www.ic3.gov. They urged reporting failed BEC attempts as well, as information from these can be tied to broader criminal investigations.

The BEC Workshops were coordinated through the National Council of ISACs and were sponsored by Symantec.

I would like to thank the teams at JOANN Stores and Starbucks for their support of this effort and a big shout out to Starbucks for providing all attendees with some delicious coffee.

For more info or to join in at another workshop in another city, visit: https://nhisac.org/events/nhisac-events/business-e-mail-compromise-workshop/

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