If you work in accounting or human resource, the past few months might have been a busy season for you – tax season.

Either working in-house, accounting firm or a tax-processing company, you have a profusion of forms and sheets to fill in. In these forms and sheets lies significant information of your clients, personal identifiable information (PII) in particular.

Nevertheless, when you stay unconscious of the security risk in your working environment, your clients’ information will be at stake once you become the target of a business email compromise (BEC), a kind of phishing scam.

The trick you might fall for

You must have heard of a wide variety of phishing scams. The baits are usually a seemingly familiar and reliable claimed sender and an urgent request.

Accordingly, in the case of BEC, the claimed sender would be your boss or someone who works at your company. Through social engineering, the scammers would know you and your boss so well that they are aware of who you work with or work for, how you usually communicate with each other, as well as what you are working on recently.

With such an all-round knowledge about you, the scammers could easily impersonate as your dear colleagues. They may have several rounds of email conversation with you before asking you for what they want.

Having fully gained your trust, they would either send you a phishing website or directly ask you for W-2 information of employees in the company. No matter which path they take, they will gain access to a large number of PII.

Consequently, they will steal tax returns from the pockets of taxpayers you are responsible for. Meanwhile, personal information via phishing emails, popular on underground markets, is much likely to be used to stage future attacks.

This is no new trick

As early as March 2016, a growing line of corporations and businesses have been found to have fallen for similar schemes. Companies like SeagateSnapchat, and Sprouts Farmer’s Market were among the businesses that were victimized by email scams that use the same modus.

By the end of the same month, Pivotal Software, a San Francisco-based software and services company, was breached via a phishing scheme that leaked an undisclosed number of employee tax information. Similar scams also happened in the education sector.

Do take precautions

We are increasingly relying on email as the primary tool for information exchange and storage in workplaces. Therefore, scammers are making more and more efforts to compromise business emails. Accordingly, we shall take stronger precautions against BECs. For example:

  • Use effective anti-phishing tools. Installing a professional anti-phishing add-in to your Outlook would be a good choice. e.g. Mr. Post. Backed by the top-rated threat intelligence and emerging AI (artificial intelligence) technology, it informs you of any potential risk with one click. Currently free and available on Microsoft AppSource.

If you’d like to recommend this add-in to the whole organization instead of installing it one by one, you can use “Centralized Deployment” to finish whole deployment in one minute.

Here is a video to guide you through the installation.