News

The July 15 tax filing deadline is finally behind you. Now is the perfect time to address the growing number of cyberattacks still taking place in the accounting industry.

Many accounting practices are reporting that IT vendors and employers rushed to provide access for remote employees without fully understanding how to properly implement and secure it. This has resulted in an increased number of cyberattacks on accounting practices of all sizes. With the increase in the remote workforce and the ongoing COVID pandemic, there has been a 300 percent increase in cyberattacks.

As hackers continue to get more sophisticated with their tactics to obtain critical data from CPA firms, the process of accessing a network, destroying backups and encrypting data is becoming increasingly common. In addition to the standard ransomware attack, cybercriminals are now threatening to post data that they have stolen from the practice if you refuse to pay their ransom demands. Most threat actors have shifted to this modality as a way of almost guaranteeing that a business will pay the ransom to get its data back.

After breaching the practice’s network, the threat actors typically conduct surveillance to understand the types of applications running and the location of data and backups. They will often deploy credential harvesting software to steal usernames and passwords from devices and applications and use the information to further exploit the system.

While conducting surveillance, hackers will attempt to move laterally through the network to gain access to additional devices. There have been numerous cases in which the threat actors deploy multiple screen-sharing applications on a network to easily gain remote access in the event the IT department tries to lock them out.