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Cyber Criminals Targeting Bank Accounts of Small Companies

The Electronics Payments Association 'NACHA' with over 15,000 financial institutions as members has warned that cyber criminals are increasingly launching assaults on small businesses and banks to plunder corporate accounts by exploiting stolen banking details.

Earlier in August 2009, NACHA cautioned its members that attackers were increasingly capturing sensitive credentials by employing keylogging software and other malicious programs.

The perpetrators' malicious software alerts them when a potential victim logs onto a bank's website. The software by playing tricks makes the user falsely believe that his computer has stopped responding and at that time the perpetrator, pretending to be the user, secretly carries out financial transaction on the user's account, NACHA noted.

Sometimes cyber attackers are duping small business operators into going to phishing websites that impersonate the financial institution of their companies, where they are prompted to enter their credentials, according to the NACHA.

In some cases, malicious e-mail attachments lead to the download of data stealing or keystroke logging malware which are subsequently employed to seize credentials of the business operators' bank accounts when they feed in details inside the login spaces of the banking website.

Moreover, in several instances, scammers use similar procedures to penetrate companies. They dispatch an e-mail specially targeted at the company's manager or treasurer containing a virus-laden link or attachment, which on clicking stealthily plants malware designed for capturing passwords.

Cyber criminals, with the help of the captured credentials, are taking over or plundering corporate accounts for conducting illegal money transfers via networks of electronic payment.

NACHA warns that the reason why online criminals are seemingly attacking small sized businesses is that they comparatively lack strong verification procedures, alert raising and transaction control abilities.

A similar warning was issued to the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center's members during the end week of August 2009. The warning states that well-planned gangs of cyber criminals in Eastern Europe are victimizing more and more small-and-medium businesses in the US, triggering an online crime worth millions of dollars that has become an issue of concern for the largest financial institutions in the country.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

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