Securing Your Business Banking Account from Cybercrime

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Cybercrime

The increasing digitisation of industry plays a vital role in business growth. But it also brings risk.

Cybercrime targets victims from private individuals to large corporates, through various forms of phishing and illicit installations of malware. The results are lost income, reputational damage, financial loss and ransomed data.

While the majority of criminals have quite basic technical capabilities, attacks are increasingly enabled by sophisticated tools available in the online criminal marketplace. With some criminal groups even industrialising their activities, cybercrime is evolving and growing fast.

'Ransomware' attacks have grown, leveraging threats to publish data online, or block its use. Targeted fraud is a rising cost for individuals and businesses.

We want to help you build your cybercrime knowledge. Print our short guide for SMEs (PDF, 3.6MB), download our Five Top Rules for reducing your risk (PDF, 2.2MB), or read more detail on the pages below.

The criminals behind cybercrime

Guide to build your cybercrime knowledge to protect your small-to-medium business

Short guide for SMEs

Build your cybercrime knowledge with our guide to protecting your small-to-medium business.

Five top rules

Read our top tips for reducing the risk of cybercrime in your business.

HSBC Fraud Awareness Guide

Protect your business against fraud & cybercrime

Find out more about Protecting your business from cybercrime

Phishing

One of the most common forms of cyberattack, bank phishing operates through emails, calls and texts, which are often convincing and appear to come from legitimate senders.

Malware

Short for ‘malicious software’, malware is coded with the intention of stealing confidential information from individuals and businesses. Once it breaches a computer or network, it can also spy on internet activity and damage data. An increasingly common form of attack is the fraudulent redirection of internet banking users.

Business email compromise

Also known as CEO/Chairman fraud, business email compromise is one of the emerging forms of cybercrime that is frequently targeted at SMEs. It combines the techniques of malware and phishing to trick users into revealing confidential business information, leading to huge financial damage.

Text and phone scams

This form of fraud spoofs the contact details and websites of legitimate sources to trick targets into making payments or revealing confidential information. Scam calls and texts are often referred to as ‘vishing’ (voice phishing) and ‘smishing’ (SMS phishing) respectively.

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