Hackers Offering Less than $150 to Hack Corporate Email Accounts – 12.5 Million Email Archive Files are Exposed

Cybercriminals offering BEC-as-a-service to compromise corporate email accounts to buyers for as low as $150 for the targets organizations accounting and finance departments which are the potential risk to face impacts.

The hacking forum is mainly used by cybercriminals to advertise their offer and compromised credentials are frequently shared across the various underground dark web forums.

FBI says Business Email Compromise (BEC) and Email Account Compromise (EAC) have caused $12 billion in losses since October 2013.

Another scenario, Hackers could access Nearly 12.5 million email archive files are exposed from misconfigured an FTP, SMB, S3 buckets, and NAS drives from publicly available sources instead of compromised email accounts to access sensitive data.

According to Digital Shadows, 33,568 email addresses of finance departments exposed through third party compromises. Eighty-three percent (27,992) of these emails had passwords associated with them.

Targeting Corporate Email Accounts

Cybercriminals mainly targeting business emails that contain valuable data such as contract scans, purchase orders, and payroll information.

It helps more in order to perform targeted attacks against accounting departments and senior employee that leads to mimics as a legitimate company employee and transfer the confidential data.

This method relies solely on social engineering, is often highly targeted and involves a significant level of reconnaissance to be effective

How Hackers Gain Access to Corporate Email Accounts

Apart from the traditional compromising method such as targeted phishing campaigns, information-stealing malware, and keyloggers, cybercriminals using other methods to gain access to the targeted business emails.

1. Paying for access

Threat actors selling the company credentials in the various underground forum as a service where anyone can buy the credentials based on the type of mail service and the price will be around $150.

2.Re-using Credentials

According to Digital Shadow, Re-using same credentials common for employees to reuse passwords across multiple accounts. With many email and password combinations of finance departments email accounts already compromised, cybercriminals can get lucky.

In this case, discovered emails address in total 33,568 finance department
email addresses exposed in third-party breaches. Eighty-three percent (27,992) of these emails had passwords associated.

3.Misconfigured Archives

A recent researcher from digital shadows reveals that 12.5 Million Email Archives Exposed Across Online misconfigured File Stores where they discovered tens of thousands of invoice (27,000), purchase orders (7,000), and payments (21,000). In some instances, these were incredibly sensitive.

Business Email Compromise is becoming increasingly profitable for threats actors, who are conducting highly targeted campaigns. Unfortunately, we’re making it easy for adversaries to gain access to the precious information that sits within email inboxes. Researchers said.

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