Employer retirement accounts are facing increasingly sophisticated attacks by hackers looking to get a slice of worker savings, and cryptocurrency investing is particularly at risk for scams, according to two financial-focused cybersecurity experts.
“We’re seeing a significant increase in the hackers getting access to these retirement assets,” Brian Edelman, CEO of cybersecurity protection firm FCI, said during CNBC’s Financial Advisor Summit on Tuesday. “We’re out there protecting them on the investment side, but we need to also manage the data—if a hacker gets at the retirement assets, then there is nothing left to manage.”
Edelman said during a panel discussion called “Securing Your Savings” that criminals will use a corporate email hack to intercept a conversation between a retirement plan saver and a plan administrator. They then try to get the participant to divert savings to a separate account run by the criminal.
Gregory Wilson, chief information security officer for Putnam Investments, said he has seen an increase in phishing attacks in which hackers send a fake message to take over an account and steal the assets. If these types of attacks are not stopped, there is a very short window of time for authorities to get the money back, according to Wilson.
“You need to get [the money] back in two days; otherwise, the ability to get those funds back drops significantly,” he said.
Both experts said…
