Barbara Corcoran Has Tremendous Business Savvy- And Still Got Scammed
Barbara Corcoran is no dummy when it comes to business and building an empire. As you may know, Barbara built the largest residential realty company in New York and is now an investor/shark on Shark Tank. I have even had the pleasure of hearing her speak on best strategies for getting teams motivated and moving forward, for hiring the right people and firing the wrong ones, for creating an atmosphere of fun, and for forging ahead when the chips are down.
With all of her success, it would seem that she is untouchable.
Recent events prove otherwise. Barbara’s company, The Corcoran Group, was recently hit with a fairly common and unsophisticated phishing attack which resulted in an almost $400,000 loss to cybercriminals.
In short, her bookkeeper received an email from Barbara’s assistant (or so she thought) asking her to approve a $388,000 transfer to a German company. The bookkeeper responded back to the email asking legitimate questions such as the correct account to use and the name of the “German” company before approving the transfer. The problem is that the email didn’t come from the assistant (after the fact, Barbara’s team realized the email address was missing one letter) and instead came from the cybercriminals. All they had to do was reply back to the bookkeeper’s email, answer the questions and it was done. $388,000 transferred to a Chinese account and now completely gone. You can read more about the incident here.
So how did this happen to someone with so much business savvy you ask? The answer is simple and very common. Her team fell prey to an email phishing scam which is something her fellow shark Robert Herjavec, who made his millions running a tech company, knows all too well.
"85% of all cybercrime across the world comes through email, which is what happened to Barbara," Herjavec said. "This is very, very common. It's been happening of businesses for two, three years now. It's now happening to individuals."
With this in mind, the question you should be asking yourself is not “how could this happen to someone like Barbara?”; instead it should be “how can I prevent this from happening to me?”. There are a few very simple things you can do to protect yourself and your business including always verify the email is coming from someone you trust and be on top of your bank accounts, daily.
There is one other step you can implement which, like in Barbara’s case, can save your business from this type of loss and that is employee training. As cyber criminals evolve and become more sophisticated, so do their strategies. Your staff needs to be aware of what to look for and what to do if they spot an attempted attack. We can help with that and have a training program suited for small and mid-sized businesses- contact us today to find out more.
We are also offering a FREE Cyber Security Threat Assessment on a first come, first serve basis. This CONFIDENTIAL assessment will reveal inadequacies in your backups and security protocols so you can address them now to gain peace of mind that your organization is truly prepared and protected from becoming the victim of a cyber security attack.
Contact us today to claim your FREE assessment:
https://www.tdaniels.com/signup/
You’ll be glad you did.
