Cyber crooks use the KISS method – Keep it Simple … Quickbooks, Credit Cards and your supposedly anonymized data – things we think we know and trust are being used in scams that not only evade technical detection and are so simple in their concept that almost anyone could be fooled.
I’m Jim Love, CIO of ITWC, publishers of IT World Canada and TechNewsDay in the U.S. sitting in for the vacationing Howard Solomon.
QuickBooks is the accounting software which is a blessing to small and even medium sized businesses. It’s reasonably priced, affordable by any business and can automate many tasks from bookkeeping to accounting and time keeping and billing.
As one of its productivity benefits, the software has ability to send invoices and even enable phone follow up. It was this capability that hackers have turned into a surprisingly low tech phone scam.
While software and automated defences have become more and more sophisticated in anti-phishing defenses: the tried and true telephone fraud becomes more and more attractive and it even has its own name – vishing, short for voice phishing.
The attackers just need a phone number that they get the unsuspecting mark to call. When they do, an operative will try to extract valuable information from them.
These attacks were highly effective at evading detection because they were identical to non-fraudulent QuickBooks notifications,
What makes it even easier is that QuickBooks offers free trials for 30 days….
