(Photo: Worldwide Facilities)

The 2018 Internet Crime Report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) shows wire transfer fraud is currently a major threat to businesses. 

According to the report, business email compromise (BEC) is one of the leading risks, with manufacturing and construction being the most targeted industries in 2017 and 2018. BEC usually involves a social engineering tactic that occurs after a hacker compromises a business's email and attempts to forge wire transfers to anonymous accounts (often offshore), which makes tracing them more difficult. The manufacturing and construction industries have been generally slow to secure cyber policies to protect from this threat, making them a prime target for hacking.

According to the U.S. Treasury, attackers tend to shift their strategies over time to make it more difficult to anticipate a hack. Fraud often occurs when an employee unwittingly discloses passwords to a hacker. Hackers may lurk for some time, reviewing outgoing wire transfer requests to test the amounts and even learn the tone of email exchanges relating to wire transfers. Hackers then target vendors of that business—or the business itself—to request or initiate fraudulent wire transfers.