Protecting Your Business Data Using Fake Information

Technology has played a crucial role in allowing us to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic, 
Working remotely with confidential data is is risky under most circumstances and throughout the Coronavirus pandemic there has been an increase in hacking and an increase in the number of companies falling victim to ransomware. 

Cyber criminals have been very quick to adapt their efforts to steal access to information and systems. 

Hackers constantly improve at penetrating cyber defenses to steal valuable documents. So some researchers propose using an artificial-intelligence algorithm to hopelessly confuse them, once they break-in, by hiding the real deal amid a mountain of convincing fakes.

Like regular phishing, spear phishing emails appear to come from a trusted or familiar source. The criminals gather personal information about the target and modify their message to make it look legitimate. Using this critical  information cyber criminals can hack user accounts, email accounts, addresses, names, IP addresses, or take over personal devices. Fraudsters then use the stolen personal details to present themselves as real customers andn use these details to make fraudulent purchases, create fake customer accounts, or manipulate traffic.

If you operate a business online, there are various types of fraudulent activity to be aware of.

• The most extreme of these include cyberbot attacks, which operate on a massive scale and can access millions of online accounts. 

• Corporate identity fraud occurs when a fraudster impersonates a legitimate business using fake or stolen company identity and/or financial information to obtain goods, money or services.  

• A business may be impersonated using phishing emails, bogus websites and/or false invoices. Sometimes a fraudster will even change company details with government agencies such as UK Companies House.

Now an algorithm, called Word Embedding–based Fake Online Repository Generation Engine (WE-FORGE), generates decoys to confuse and frustrate criminals. 

This algorithm can “create a lot of fake versions of every document that a company feels it needs to guard,” says its developer, Dartmouth College cyber security researcher V. S. Subrahmanian. If hackers were after, say, the formula for a new drug, they would have to find the relevant needle in a haystack of fakes. This could mean checking each formula in detail, and perhaps investing in a few dead-end recipes. “The name of the game here is, ‘Make it harder,’” Subrahmanian explains. “‘Inflict pain on those stealing from you.’” 

The system produces convincing decoys by searching through a document for keywords. For each one it finds, it calculates a list of related concepts and replaces the original term with one chosen at random. The process can produce dozens of documents that contain no proprietary information but still look plausible. 

Subrahmanian says he tackled this project after reading that companies are unaware of new kinds of cyber attacks for an average of 312 days after they begin. 

Fraud Advisory Panel:   Met Police:     I-HLS:     NIBusinesInfo:    RightDigitalSolutions:     EmailHippo: 

If you are unsure how to make your client, financial and operational data totally secure, you should ask an expert in cyber security and digital workflow. Contact Cyber Security Intelligence for  advice and recommendatios on improvi ng your organisation's reslieience.

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