African Hacker syndicate Wreak Havoc for Nigerian Businesses

A well designed African hacker syndicate targeting a huge number of companies all over Nigeria has been identified as it launched fresh fraud threats that have already caused RM 45m in losses within the first half of 2015, thus reported utusan.com in news on December 20, 2015.

Understandably, the new scammers' gang tries acquiring access of different companies' e-mail accounts as a means to churn fraudulent gains. Unfortunately, the actual loss from these scams may be more given that many more business entities still exist that are not aware about the scam so no report from them have been lodged with the police.

What's more, as per sources, the attacks and consequent losses happened not just in the case of small firms; however, big corporations with more than 1m ringgit worth assets too are being targeted.

During the past few years when the African Hacker gang was first identified, the damage it did was confined to only small losses; however, sources said that some very serious losses too occurred as evident from the police reports lodged.

Sources further stated that e-mail attackers, thought to belong to Nigeria, infiltrated electronic mail accounts of companies or people working there for garnering all the data which the cyber criminals then utilized for unlawful monetary deals.

People working at the companies who are getting targeted are usually staff members of the accounts else finance departments and who do not know the electronic mails coming to them are from the hackers so they unwittingly do as per the instructions in the messages like issuing several monetary transactions from accounts that are situated within some foreign countries in the names of their superiors.

At times the hackers would even execute convincing e-mail interactions among firms and their clients in a way that the clients would be induced to allow those firms to withdraw money from their accounts such as for fulfilling certain transactions.

In the end according to the sources, during the months from January through June 2015, a monetary theft of RM 44.3 m to RM 45 m was detected for enterprises registered within Nigeria.

» SPAMfighter News - 12/23/2015