Can network monitoring stop CEO fraud?
Mostly no, and it is better to know that up front. In CEO fraud, an e-mail, call or chat message that seems to come from a senior manager persuades an employee to make a payment. The messages travel through your mail provider's cloud and the payment goes through online banking, both of which look entirely normal on the network. A network detection tool such as NetSenX does not read e-mail content and cannot tell a genuine payment instruction from a fake one. What stops CEO fraud is process: a rule that no payment is made on the strength of a message alone, a call-back to a number from your own records, dual approval for transfers above a set amount, and explicit permission for staff to delay any request that claims to be urgent and secret. Network monitoring does help in one case: when the fraud starts with a hacked mailbox and the attacker also reaches company systems.
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