Desai Tech Solutions

Business email compromise attacks cost millions, losses doubling each year Cybercriminals follow the money, and you need look no further than Toyota Boshoku's recent $37 million loss to see why many are turning to BEC scams.   In August 2019, someone at Japan's Toyota Boshoku Corp. received fraudulent payment instructions by email to send 4 billion yen (about $37 million) to a third party — which they did. "We became aware that the directions were fraudulent shortly after the leakage," the company disclosed in a statement . The company reacted quickly once it realized the fraud and took appropriate actions to recover their losses — a prospect experts believe unlikely. If it can't recover the money, it might be forced to restate its earnings forecast downward. That could have a negative impact on its stock price. This is just the latest high-profile example of business email compromise (BEC). "I've seen this happen at least 100 times ...

Why is Hotmail not as popular as Google? Hotmail was the foremost free email service when Microsoft bought the company in 1997. Microsoft bought them as a market share play for the 9 million user accounts they had at the time — for approximately $400M, or about $40 per user. This was back when the race was all about acquiring users, and what you would do with those users once you had them, in order to monetize your investment, was “a problem for later”. In other words: prior to the dot bomb. One of the major issues leading to the demise of Hotmail was that Microsoft spent a great deal of effort spinning its wheels. It did this in order to first put HTTP proxy servers in front of the FreeBSD servers upon which Hotmail was originally built so it would look like they were all running on Microsoft technology, and then replacing the FreeBSD servers on the back end so that they actually were running on Microsoft technology. Rumor has it — and I knew casually the p...