Professor Matthew Warren, deputy director of the Deakin University Centre for Cyber Security Research, told SMSF Adviser cyber criminals are no longer simply stealing lump sums by cracking through security systems.
Instead, criminals aim for identity theft, which allows them to assume the identity of the client and transfer funds into a different account, going under the radar of SMSF firms on the lookout for suspicious external activity.
“Attackers wouldn’t necessarily go after superannuation funds to extract large sums of money in a single transaction because they know identity theft and assuming the identity of customers of those organisations would just be as successful,” he said.
Professor Warren said there is more than one route of attack, but more often than not, the pathway is based on identity theft utilising a social engineering method.
“A social engineering attack is when you are trying to manipulate people’s actions in terms of a social context whether it’s via email, whether it’s phoning someone and pretending to be someone else or whether it is physically going into an organisation,” he said.
“So in terms of threats, you are not seeing one particular type of threat but you are now seeing the sophistication of attackers develop a number of different threat strategies into a single attack.”
Great article! When you work in Verification of ID industry, read that there is a GROWING problem but people / organisations just want to carry on conducting business in the same way they have for years, while the cyber criminals and identity thieves get smarter each day. Demoralising!!!!! Ask yourself this; what happens to your certified ID once you’ve provided to someone?!!!!!
What are the measures that trustees can take and what are the “Administrators” doing about it?
M Hall, there are a number of companies, like mine, working extremely hard to offer smart digital identity solutions but ‘big business’ doesn’t have an appetite for change. They are happy to continue as is as long as their losses remain the same, which they won’t, and don’t increase!