Digital Fraud Services

Businesses present themselves through many online channels and their employees are almost entirely reliant on digital services to perform their duties. With digital fraud growing at an incredible rate, businesses are vulnerable to these criminal activities. Blackhawk Intelligence’s digital fraud prevention services are an invaluable resource in helping businesses counter this hostile threat.

Digital attack surface

When considering your businesses vulnerabilities, two environments emerge – everyone inside your company firewall and everything that is accessible outside of that firewall. The latter is referred to as for company’s digital attack surface. It’s the environment that is usually accessed via the internet and is most vulnerable to cybercriminals.

It’s a mistake to think that cybercriminals are not interested in smaller businesses, and that these businesses can somehow ‘fly under the radar’ where digital threats of this nature are concerned. Recent reports suggests that close to 30% of all data breaches involve small businesses and that ransomeware attacks are the biggest threat to small businesses along with phishing.

Whatever size of business, the true cost relates to downtime – the amount of time a business cannot operate. For smaller businesses without the financial strength to support longer periods of downtime due to a ransomeware attack or through a malicious attack the significantly damages a web asset, such attacks can be terminal events.

Rest assured though, no matter what size business you operate, Blackhawk Investigations can assist.

Typical attack modes

Digital fraud comes in many forms including:

• Identity theft: fraudsters steal your identity and pretend to be you.
• Hacking: when cyber criminals hack, it means they gain unauthorised access to your computer or system to install malware or to steal information.
• Malware: malware is an umbrella term for all malicious software including spyware, viruses, trojans and worms. Ransomware is a cruel form of malware as attackers lock down your computer until a ransom is paid.
• Phishing: the most common type of digital fraud, phishing involves cyber criminals tricking you into revealing sensitive information or paying a large sum of money to a fake business contact.
• Vishing or voice phishing: fraudsters call you up to check a few things with you, such as a recent bank transaction. In some cases, fraudsters ask you to call a number allegedly belonging to a bank or a service provider.

Digital fraud is prevalent because fraudsters know that it is relatively easy to trick business leaders and employees into clicking on a link or answering a few questions to give them what they need to penetrate your systems or bank accounts. In addition to that, many companies still do not invest enough in IT and staff, leading to weaker controls and more opportunities for fraudsters.

Countering Digital Fraud

Beware seemingly harmless free online games of social media challenges that ask you to suggest words you’d associate with things. These are part of quite elaborate social profiling tricks to get people to reveal words they may use for passwords.

Phishing and ransomware are by far the most common types of digital fraud. It happens when someone sends you a genuine-looking email and urges you to click on a link or download an attachment. The link will take you to a website that contains malware or the attachment itself has malware, and the malware will then allow cyber criminals to take controls of your computers or systems.

Vishing, or voice phishing, happens when fraudsters pretend to be someone else and call you up and trick you into revealing information that they need to access your bank accounts.

To combat both phishing and vishing, being alert is key. Companies that have successfully reduced the risks of cyber fraud are companies with stringent training programs, and their employees are trained to question every email and phone call.

Even with the best digital fraud preventative measures in place, at least those within the budget of your organisation, the weakest link is still your employees. The best way to counter this is through training. Training can help employees and senior managers alike, to recognise threats for what they are. Just in the same way attackers may look for patterns in communication they can emulate to fool employees into thinking they are a colleague, good training can help employees recognise when they may be most vulnerable and need to be hyper vigilant.

The Digital Fraud team at Blackhawk Intelligence

At Blackhawk Intelligence, we have a Forensic division under which we have experts working with clients on digital forensics, forensic accounting and, forensic handwriting.

Within the digital fraud function, we help companies to put in place protective digital strategies that will raise your security levels, train your staff in detection techniques and introduce a corporate security culture.

In the event that cyber criminals have managed to penetrate your systems or fraudsters have managed to trick your employees into paying them, our digital fraud specialists will work with you to best preserve the evidence and assess how to recover the money.

Our dedicated digital fraud team has access to the latest fraud tracing software. We can recover all sorts of data, including deleted, hidden and security protected files. We can detect when there have been unauthorised data transfers, pick up on employee internet misuse and also suspected competitor espionage.

We work fast because any delay may see incriminating evidence removed by the perpetrators rapidly. Our digital fraud specialists will secure your hardware to prevent tampering, obtain and copy hard drives, and investigate data settings from installed applications and programs.

Digital fraud is everywhere. Every employee now has a computer, a smartphone, a password to a network, making it relatively easy for cyber criminals to extract data. So take steps now to safeguard your key digital assets.

To talk to a digital fraud specialist, please contact us by telephone on +44 (0)20 8108 9317 for a free, confidential discussion or use the secure contact form on this page.