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Cyber Security

Cybercriminals Spoof CFO of Major Sports Organisation to Trick Employee to Wire Funds

Published

3 years ago

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Written by Jeremy Fuchs, cybersecurity researcher/analyst at Avanan, a Check Point Software Company

If you get an email from your CFO requesting urgent action, what do you do? That’s what Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks try to do. An executive–often a CFO or CEO–will have an urgent favor. Payment must be made today; gift cards have to be purchased and sent now. It uses social engineering to really get lower-level employees to take an action these employees do not want to do.

We see these all the time and they are difficult to stop because there is often no malware or malicious links. The body of the text may not be terribly different from what is usually sent. These attacks are so convincing, in fact, that the FBI has charted $43 billion in losses from these scams since 2016.

In this attack, the CFO of a major sports corporation is asking someone in finance to send money via ACH (Automated Clearing House) transfer. This blog covers how threat actors managed to get a subordinate to send money back to them.

Attack

In this attack, hackers are spoofing a CFO to get a lower-level employee to send funds.

  • Vector: Email
  • Type: Business Email Compromise
  • Techniques: Social Engineering, Domain Spoof
  • Target: Any end-user

Email Example #1

The user is presented with an email from the CFO of this major corporation. The CFO asks the recipient of the email to make payment to a legitimate insurance company, West Bend Mutual. Even more clever is the fact that the URL in the ‘from’ address is taken from their slogan. However, this is clearly a fake, as the “reply-to” address at the top of the email differs from the company’s email address. You will notice the banner that shows the email wasn’t from the displayed sender. This was added by the tenant’s generic Office 365, not Proofpoint. It is the only thing that alerted the end-user that something was amiss.

Email Example #2

This is a nearly identical email that affected another company. In fact, we have seen dozens of this type of attack. Notice two differences: There is no external banner alerting the end-user to potential danger; the “Get in touch” email at the bottom spells Silver Lining as ‘Silver Linning’.

Techniques
BEC attacks are staggeringly successful because they play on people’s desires to perform well for their bosses. They are also successful because they are hard to stop. Secure Email Gateways do not have the contextual information they need to stop these attacks. These gateways are designed only to monitor inbound emails—therefore they have no way of scanning an internal email or understanding the context or conversational relationships within an organization. When an external gateway sees an email from the ‘CEO’ to the ‘CFO’, it will be the very first time it has seen such a conversation. While an internal solution will have seen thousands of similar real, internal conversations to compare it to, an external gateway can only guess at the context.

In this attack, a banner inserted by default security was key. However, banners are not the be-all, and end-all; research has found that too many banners can lead to end-users ignoring them. We are seeing a dramatic uptick in these types of attacks. The FBI reported a 62% increase in losses between July 2019 and December 2021; this amount of money has been pilfered from about a quarter million reported incidents. In 2021, $40 million of the losses were related to cryptocurrency; in 2020, that number was closer to $10 million.

A variation of this attack happened recently at Cisco, where a hacker was able to steal an employee’s password, then pretended to be a trusted organization during phone calls and emails. This is an escalation of the traditional BEC attack, but it is all part of the same family. The idea is to use trusted names and partners to get lower-level employees to hand over money or credentials. Without using malware, attachments, or malicious links, these hacks represent the apex of social engineering.

This type of attack has been seen in a variety of companies, and in a variety of industries. Any CFO or higher executive is a potential target. The best thing, then, is to proactively block these attacks, so that end-users do not have to make a decision about whether a request or email is legitimate or not.

Best Practices: Guidance and Recommendations

To guard against these attacks, security professionals can do the following:

  • Always check reply-to addresses to make sure they match
  • If ever unsure about an email, ask the original sender
  • Encourage users to ask finance before acting on invoices
  • Read the entire email; look for any inconsistencies, misspellings, or discrepancies
  • If using banners, be sure to not bombard end users with them; only use them at critical times so that end users take them seriously
  • Deploy multi-factor authentication for all accounts, but especially for email
  • Configure accounts to notify you of changes
  • Use a password manager to create and store your passwords–you should never actually know your own password
  • Remind users to only share personal information in real time, either in person or by phone. Encourage them to be skeptical of all messages with links, and to always verify with the sender, in real-time, any messages with attached files
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Cloud

SentinelOne Simplifies Secure Cloud Migrations on AWS

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11 hours ago

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June 13, 2025

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SentinelOne today announced its participation in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Workload Migration Program. This initiative supports AWS Partner Network (APN) members with SaaS offerings on AWS to accelerate and streamline workload migrations.

Through the program, SentinelOne will provide AWS customers with accelerated, secure cloud migration support, leveraging modern AI-powered CNAPP capabilities to ensure rapid and protected transitions. With access to AWS funding, technical resources, and go-to-market support, SentinelOne will help organizations reduce migration timelines and costs while maintaining robust security.

SentinelOne’s Singularity Cloud Security delivers real-time visibility and protection throughout the migration journey—whether from on-premises or another cloud—enabling a secure, seamless transition to AWS.

“Through our participation in the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program, SentinelOne is helping customers accelerate secure cloud migrations with end-to-end protection and visibility,” said Ric Smith, President of Product, Technology, and Operations at SentinelOne. “Whether moving from on-prem or another cloud to AWS, organizations can count on us to deliver the security they need throughout their journey—realizing the performance, speed, agility, and cost benefits of the cloud.”

Singularity Cloud Security combines agentless and agent-based protection for deep visibility, continuous posture management, and real-time threat detection across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. By collaborating with AWS and ecosystem partners, SentinelOne ensures seamless integration into migration projects, helping customers move faster, reduce risk, and scale confidently in the cloud.

Availability: SentinelOne’s solutions are available globally.

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Cyber Security

Beyond Blocklists: How Behavioural Intent Analysis Can Safeguard Middle East Businesses from Rising AI-Driven Bot Threats

Published

3 days ago

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June 10, 2025

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The Middle East is facing an unprecedented surge in AI-driven bot attacks, with malicious automation now outpacing traditional defenses. Mohammad Ismail, Vice President for EMEA at Cequence Security, warns that legacy tools like IP blocklists and rate limiting are no match for today’s sophisticated threats (more…)

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Cyber Security

Sophos Boosts Firewall with New Protection and Incident Response Features

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3 days ago

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June 10, 2025

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Sophos has announced a significant update to its Sophos Firewall software, introducing enhanced protection and incident response capabilities. This update notably includes Sophos NDR Essential, a new feature now available free of charge to all customers holding an XStream Protection license for Sophos Firewall.

This integration empowers Sophos Firewall with two dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) engines specifically designed to detect both malware communications and those utilizing algorithmically generated domain names. This advanced functionality, derived from the Sophos Network Detection and Response (NDR) probe, aims to identify sophisticated malware communications even if they are previously unknown or not yet indexed. It serves as a powerful complement to the Active Threat Response capabilities already embedded within Sophos firewalls.

Chris McCormack, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Sophos

Addressing the technical demands of such advanced detection, Chris McCormack, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Sophos, explained the strategic approach, “NDR traffic analysis requires substantial processing power. That’s why we’ve adopted a new approach by deploying an NDR solution in Sophos Cloud to offload the heaviest tasks from the firewall.” This cloud-centric design ensures optimal performance without burdening the firewall’s on-device resources.

Beyond network detection, the update also brings significant improvements to connectivity and user authentication. Sophos Connect now integrates EntraID for Single Sign-On (SSO). This new feature for the VPN client, bundled with Sophos Firewall, is set to enhance both the security and user experience for SSL and IPsec VPN connections. The integration with EntraID (Azure AD) enables users to authenticate and leverage multi-factor authentication for both Sophos Connect and access to the user portal hosted by the firewall, streamlining secure access.

Further VPN-related enhancements include:

  • Improved user interface and usability: Connection types have been renamed for greater clarity, with “site-to-site” now referred to as “policy-based” and tunnel interfaces as “route-based,” making configurations more intuitive.
  • Dynamic validation of the IP address pool: For VPN connections (SSL VPN, IPsec, L2TP, and PPTP), the system now dynamically validates the allocated IP address pool, helping to better resolve potential IP address conflicts.
  • Strict profile enforcement: IPsec profiles now exclude default values to ensure algorithm synchronization, effectively eliminating potential fragmentation of session negotiation packets that could otherwise prevent site-to-site VPN tunnels from being established.
  • Route-based VPN and SD-RED scalability: The system has been optimized to support up to 3,000 simultaneously established tunnels. Specifically, Sophos Firewall solutions can now manage up to 1,000 SD-RED site-to-site tunnels and connect up to 650 concurrent SD-RED devices.

Additional management improvements enhance administrative flexibility and search capabilities:

  • More flexible DHCP Prefix Delegation (IPv6 DHCP-PD): The system now supports a broader range of prefixes, from /48 to /64, improving compatibility with various internet service providers.
  • Router Advertisement (RA) and DHCPv6 server: These features are now enabled by default, simplifying IPv6 network setup.
  • Resizable table columns: The web admin interface continues its adaptation for ultra-wide screens, with many configuration pages now allowing users to resize columns as needed for improved usability.
  • Enhanced object search functionality: The search field within the SD-WAN routing configuration screen now supports more granular criteria, including route name, ID, objects, and object values like IP addresses and domains. Similarly, local ACL rules now also support object name and value searches, extending to content-based searches for more precise results.
  • Default configuration changes: To streamline initial setups, default firewall rules and rule groups previously created during new firewall deployments have been removed. The initial configuration now only includes the default network rule and MTA rules. Furthermore, the default firewall rule group and the default gateway probe for custom gateways are now set to “None” by default.

Sophos continues its commitment to cybersecurity through a “Secure by Design” approach, enhancing the intrinsic security of its firewalls. This methodology involves the containerization of specific features and rigorous integrity checks on critical operating system files using mathematical checksums. Any detected checksum mismatch triggers a potential compromise alert, enabling monitoring teams to proactively identify possible security incidents affecting the firewall OS integrity. This proactive detection allows incident response and development teams to react swiftly to critical security events.

This update is now available for manual download and deployment by customers with any Sophos Firewall equipped with a valid license.

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