Attention ALL PERSONS involved in Real Estate. Just fresh into our office is a new security threat.
If you are not using professional email and using your personal Gmail for business purposes please read.
Let me preface this: Everyone I speak to within the real estate market is super busy.
Emails are flying around and there are millions of transactions moving across email with anxious buyers looking to send money to whomever they need to in order to secure a place to live.
Cybercriminals are very aware of this and are exploiting it.
Here’s how it’s working…the cybercriminals gain access to your email. They begin to read the emails looking for transactions they can exploit.
They copy your signature picture. They copy your email format. They copy everything they can to spoof your email identity.
Then the cybercriminal sends a spoofed email to a specific client(s) with all your email particulars giving them instructions to wire transfer money to the cybercriminal’s bank account.
The buyer does this because of the level of urgency occurring in the housing market.
Remember: Cybercriminals hack human behavior, not computers.
Here a few quick steps your need to take immediately if this happens to you:
Step 1: Change your password
Step 2: Enable 2FA (two-factor authentication) immediately
Step 3: Send out an email to your buyers/customers about the breach
Step 4: Have your computer inspected for hidden malware and other nefarious software
Step 5: Update ALL your passwords; starting with any banking and other financial institutions
For the other steps your need to take (so I don’t have to write all this stuff down again) download my “Protect Your Money” ebook that gives you 3 tools you need to be using.
This isn’t just the big boys being hacked as we saw with Colonial and JBS. Those hit the headlines but the small guys don’t make the headlines who lose millions every day too.
No business is out of reach.
These criminals are casting huge nets across the Internet searching for any size and type of business and patiently waiting for an employee or executive to click one-bad-link.
Understand, these guys are master hackers utilizing supercomputers, AI, and machine learning to steal your money!
To learn more…download and read my book. It’s FREE.
And, frankly, I wrote this because it the same conversations I continue to have with business owners and CEOs.
Cheers, ca
P.S. nobody wants to have to do step 3.
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