FBI: Businesses Lost $215 Million to Email Scams in 2014

According to a recent alert from the FBI, businesses lost nearly $215 million to one particular type of email scam in 2014. The business email compromise (BEC) swindle is a complicated scam that starts when business executives or employees email accounts are hacked.

The FBI says that the business email compromise scam is a sophisticated and increasingly common type of fraud targeting businesses that work with foreign suppliers and/or businesses that regularly perform wire transfers.

According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) – a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center –  the BEC is a global scam with subjects and victims in many countries. The IC3 has received victim and complaint data from people in every U.S. state and 45 countries. From 10/1/13 to 12/1/14, the following statistics are reported:

  • Total U.S. Victims – 1,198
  • Total U.S. Dollar Loss – $179,755,367.80
  • Total Non-U.S. Victims – 928
  • Total Non-U.S. Dollars – $35,217,136.22
  • Combined Victims – 2,126
  • Combined Dollar Loss – $214,972,503.30

CEO fraud is one variation on the BEC scam. CEO fraud starts with the email account compromise for high level executives (CEO, CFO, CTO, etc.) Posing as the executive, the cyber-criminal sends a request for the wire transfer from the compromised email account to a second employee within the company who is normally responsible for processing these requests.

According to the IC3, the wire transfer requests are well-worded, specific to the business being victimized, and do not raise suspicions to the legitimacy of the request. In some instances a request for a wire transfer from the compromised account is sent directly to the financial institution with instructions to urgently send funds to bank ‘X’ for reason ‘Y.

The people perpetuating these scams do their homework before targeting a business and its employees, monitoring and studying potential victims prior to initiating the scam. Fraudulent emails have coincided with real business travel dates for individuals whose email accounts were spoofed. These criminals have been able to accurately identify the individuals responsible for wire transfers and also the specific protocol necessary to perform wire transfers within a particular business environment.

The IC3 recommends that businesses protect themselves by adopting two-step or two-factor authentication for email when possible or to establish other communication channels – such as telephone calls – to verify significant transactions.

For more information about how to analyze the security of your inbox, take a look at this poignant infographic by Krebs on Security:

The Value of a Hacked Email Account

The Value of a Hacked Email Account

 

Don’t Blog Unless You Use These Five Blogging Tools

Are you having a hard time coming up with ideas to blog about? I did at first and still do on occasion. Now there are all kinds of free tools to help you brainstorm about ideas and also see which topics are trending. Obviously it makes more sense for you to blog about trending topics in your niche since you want eyeballs – and lots of them – reading your blog. Don’t even think about blogging unless you use these five blogging tools.

Blogging Tool #1: Quick Sprout

To start, simply enter your URL or your competitor’s URL here. You’ll see a report that looks like this:

Quick Sprout Site Analysis Tool

When you click on the “social media tab,” you’ll see a table that shows all the pages on any given domain and sorts them by social shares. This is useful because if you want to see what blog posts are working well for your competition, just put in their URLs into the tool. The table will show you their popular posts.

By analyzing your competition with the Quick Sprout tool, you’ll gain insights into what is working for your competitors and the type of content you should be producing on your blog.

Blogging Tool #2: Buzzsumo

It isn’t easy to come up with topics to write about. Luckily, Buzzsumo helps with the task.

All you have to do is visit Buzzsumo and type in a keyword related to your industry. For this example, let’s use the phrase “content marketing.”

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo crawls the web for blog posts and indexes them all like Google. Buzzsumo then sorts the results by social shares and shows the posts with the highest share count at the top.

You will see what type of content has done well in the past. You can then come up with article ideas based on the list.

For example, one of the most shared titles was “An Internet Marketing Education in 16 Ebooks and 20 Emails. No Charge.” You could easily use this to write a blog post of your own and change the title to “Get Your MBA in Internet Marketing with these 16 Ebooks and 20 Emails.”

Blogging Tool #3: Open Site Explorer

Do you want more search traffic?

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a useful tool because it sorts all the URLs within a domain by backlinks. And as you know, the more backlinks a website has, the more search traffic it will typically receive.

This helps you understand which of your blog posts are delivering the most backlinks. You should be writing more posts like those.

The tool also shows you the-most-linked-to posts on your competitors’ blogs. See what is working for them, and try to replicate that on your blog. When you do this, don’t copy your competitor. The goal is to one up them and create a better blog post. This way, you can email all the people that link to your competitor and ask them to also link to your post.

Blogging Tool #4: Emails

The best traffic source for practically any blog is email. You want to make sure you have all types of opt-ins on your blog to make it easy for people to add themselves to your mailing list.

Once you have a list, you can then email your subscribers through a service provider such as MailChimp, Aweber or Constant Contact.

As a general rule of thumb, you will want to notify your list of each blog post you release. But if you release more than three posts a week, you should consider a weekly blast to avoid flooding people’s inboxes and angering them.

Blogging Tool #5: Simply Measured

Simply Measured is a social media analytics platform and I like them because they have a handful of really cool, free social media analytics tools.

You can put in your social media handle in one of them, and the tool will tell you the best times for you to send a tweet or share a post on Facebook.

simplymeasured

Their reports will break down data such as:

  • Words and phrases your users want to see in social media posts.
  • Time of day they use these social media platforms. This way you know when to post.
  • Top users that follow you and the times when they log in.

The reason you want to use these tools is because you don’t want to tweet at 8 a.m. when all of your followers are on Twitter at 4 p.m.

Conclusions

Blogging doesn’t have to be hard. There are a ton of free blogging tools out there that can help you generate ideas and increase your readership.

How Google Indexes Web Pages

Have you ever wondered how Google crawls and indexes web pages? If you haven’t and don’t know, you should. Why? Because knowing how Google indexes web pages will help you understand how to rank better on Google.

First you’ll need some facts.

Google has had a search engine since 1998 and it has the largest database of indexed websites. Google’s database is twice as large as Yahoo or Bing. When you search for something on Google, you’re not actually searching the entire Internet, you’re just accessing Google’s database of indexed websites.

What is Google’s Index?

The Google Index is the list of all the pages and sites that Google has crawled and cached or stored on its servers. When someone performs a search, Google pulls out pages from this data. More than 40 billion web pages are indexed by Google.

Less than 10% of the entire Internet is indexed. That means there are more than 450 billion web pages that are not indexed by Google.

Google uses programs called “Spiders” to index your site.

Spiders have the following characteristics:

  • they browse the web just like people browse the web
  • they move from page to page and link to link
  • they try to find and index every page on the web

This process is called crawling.

Crawls can happen several times a day or once every few months.

Update or change your content regularly and Google will crawl your site more often.

Fun Fact: Google needs more than 1 million servers to crawl the web and deliver search results.

  • Facebook only has 181,000
  • Intel has only 75,000
  • eBay has only 54,000

7 most common reasons Google can’t crawl your pages:

  1. No or incorrectly configured robots.txt file
  2. A badly configured .htaccess file
  3. Badly written title, meta, and author tags
  4. Incorrectly configuring url parameters
  5. Low pagerank
  6. Connectivity or DNS issues
  7. Domains with bad history

How to help Google crawl more pages:

  1. Check out crawl errors and address them
  2. Be careful with Ajax applications
  3. Add a robots.txt file and make sure it’s working
  4. Add a sitemap to your site

We can help you address these four critical steps to make sure you are doing everything you can do to help Google crawl your pages.

Contact us today by emailing gabe@connect4consulting.com or calling 202-236-2968 for more information.