The digital age has never been more prominent than it is today. Wire transfers are commonplace, occurring daily in the mortgage industry to handle payments of large dollar amounts. When you have this much money going over the wire, how can you be sure you are doing what is necessary to protect the funds? What are some of the cyber security policies you can put in place at your company to protect wire transfers?
Protection of the Inbox
One of the cyber security policies you can put in place to help protect wire transfers is a secure email gateway. When you put this in place, what it will do is a scan of every single email that comes into your company. Before it hits your inbox, it is going to get a scan. There are many secure email gateway tools out there which can be excellent at identifying spam e-mails and potential fraudulent requests.
A lot of fraud happens via wire transfers with what is termed email spoofing. This is when you send an email that looks to come from a client, but is not an actual client. Someone may also steal the email account password and use it to try and start a wire transfer.
Another common tool you can put in place is an external sender notification. This can help to alert you that an email is coming from outside of your network.
Verification Before the Wire Transfer Executes
One of the best things you can do is verify the wire transfer request. When you do this type of verification, you want to reach out to the requestor, electronically or verbally, using something that is not a part of the current wire transfer request. This could be from a contact name and number you have on file from the customer, not from the request itself. This can help to verify the authenticity before you move forward.
The trick is that someone fraudulently trying to start a wire transfer has a lot of personal information already. This is why it is so important to contact the initiator of the transfer at a number you have on file.
Enabling of Multi-Factor Authentication and Strong Passwords
When you have multi-factor authentication or MFA enabled, it will require two levels of authentication for someone to get into the inbox of an individual. if they steal their password, they may not have access to their cell phone to get the code to bypass the MFA requirement. Enabling this is a great way to help protect wire transfer fraud.
You always want to push for strong and unique passwords across all your sites as well. Never use the same password across multiple sites and try to vary the password complexity.
Install Antivirus and Patch Often
Installing antivirus software and security patches on all your computers can help further protect the wire transfers. The trick with wire transfers is that it can be very difficult to spot all types of fraud. When you are doing due diligence, do manual verification’s before and after the transfer, as well as implement cyber security steps in the middle to be sure you spot what looks suspicious, before you hit the send button.