Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The FBI is reminding organisations of the serious threat posed by business email compromise (BEC) scams, declaring that it caused over $1.8 billion worth of losses to businesses last year. The newly-published annual cybercrime report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reveals that it had received a record number of complaints and claims of financial loss – with internet crime causing more than $4 billion in losses.

It should come as no surprise that the federal government takes cybersecurity compliance quite seriously. After all, federal agencies manage massive stores of data related to national and international security and public health, as well as the personal information of most residents of the country. FISMA (the Federal Information Security Management Act) defines a set of security requirements intended to provide oversight for federal agencies on this front.

In early March, Microsoft reported a large, coordinated attack that exploited critical vulnerabilities in Exchange Server 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019 in an attempt to exfiltrate credentials and other sensitive information from organizations’ mailboxes. Microsoft attributed this attack to a sophisticated Chinese group code-named HAFNIUM. The first detected attempts date back to January 2021.