A Brief List of Email Security Case

2020

Corcoran Group was scammed out of USD$400,000. The attacker impersonated the judge’s assistant by using a similar email address of her assistant to send renewal payment request to her bookkeeper.

2019

Toyota Boshoku Corporation, a major supplier of Toyota auto parts, was scammed out of USD$370,000 in 2019. The cybercriminals convinced the financial executive in Toyota by fraud email to change the bank account information on a wire transfer.

2019

Popular email services msn.com, hotmail.com and outlook.com were affected by a significant data breach. Some customers’ email accounts were accessed by cybercriminals unauthorizedly. Customers’ emails on Microsoft email server are in cleartext, which let them be easily exploited and compromised.

2017

Deloitte’s global email servers provided by Microsoft Azure has been compromised through an administrator’s account. Some emails had attachments with sensitive security and design details have been breached.

2017

The UK Parliament has been hit by a "sustained and determined" cyber-attack by hackers attempting to gain access to MPs' and their staffers' email accounts. Up to 90 email accounts were compromised during the cyber-attack. It was reported that Russian hackers had put passwords belonging to senior ministers, ambassadors and senior police officers up for sale online.

2017

Hackers attacked an email server of company that belonged to Beckham's PR manager, which caused 18.6 million emails to be leaked including Beckham's emails, causing the collapse of Beckham’s positive image.

2016

The agent of Hillary Clinton opened a phishing site to cause an internal email leak incident. Hackers submitted the leaked emails to WikiLeak. The leaked emails are disclosed during the presidential election campaign, which gave her a heavy blow and altered the result of the election.

2016

Yahoo admitted that data on 500 million accounts was stolen, which includes email address, phone numbers, birthday, hash code and etc. This had become the largest leak incident in 2016 and it caused Verizon to lower the acquiring price with $ 350 million.

2016

The head of Nigerian e-mail scams transnational criminal gangs was captured, who made hundreds of millions of Internet users worldwide suffer a loss of USD60 million. Their tricks of committing the crime include: tampering supplier's e-mail, sending false information to buyer, controlling corporate executives' e-mail and requiring financial employees to do wire transfers and so on.

2016

European largest cable manufacturer, Leo Group, suffered an e-mail fraud with a loss of 40 million Euros. The fraudsters disguised as the headquarter, sent a request of payment to North Romania branch, and the Treasurer transferred 40 million Euros to the fraudsters' account in accordance with the request.

2016

Japan's large travel agency J * B encountered phishing email; 8 million users' information was leaked, including their name, address and passport number etc. The email was disguised as a ticket booking confirmation mail from ANA, J * B staff opened the email, and thus resulted in computer and server virus infection.

2016

The new extortion virus Locky was spreading via email, and several large organizations were impacted. Locky mainly used e-mail attachments to spread documents containing malicious macros to infect the user's computer and maliciously encrypt the important information, which cannot be decrypted unless ransom was paid.

2016

Austrian aircraft parts manufacturer F * CC encountered email fraud; the attacker posed as an employee or partner, sending an e-mail to the CEO for emergency remittance, and thus resulted in a loss of 50 million Euros. The company immediately fired its CEO after that.

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