At Atlas Furniture Asia we take cybercrime and fraud very seriously.
With the ever-changing technology world, cybercriminals are finding new and inventive ways to target businesses all the time: whether that is spoofing emails, cloning business details or hacking into I.T. systems, sadly this has just become a normal part of business today.
A Worldwide Challenge
Some reports suggest that an estimated 65,000 small businesses suffer cyber-attacks every day.
By 2021 the cost of cybercrime will exceed $6 Trillion USD – a huge cost to businesses worldwide.
At Atlas Furniture Asia, we take this very seriously by installing some of the best security systems available, to
prevent attacks from Cybercriminals.
How Atlas Keeps Our Systems Safe
Partner with Security Professionals
We have dedicated staff members, trained in using the Microsoft security center (which runs our central business systems). We have all the correct alerts, permissions, data loss prevention and threat management set up, to name just a few steps we have taken to protect our business. Our dedication to preventing cyber-attacks not only protects our company but also our wider sphere-of-influence, including our customers and our supply chain.
Regular Staff Training & Awareness
All our members of staff are also regularly trained and kept up to date with the latest cybercrime trends. This gives us an extra layer of security as they are very alert to catching out-of-the-ordinary problems, raising it to our I.T. team and management, in order to deal with any attacks or breaches as fast as possible.
Strict Payment Processing
We also protect any payments by using certain procedures making sure that all our payments are safe, if we ever change bank details we will ALWAYS phone directly to confirm, we will have a short discussion with our customer so they will know that we are who we say we are.
Humans Are The Problem – and the Solution!
The weakest part of any I.T. security is the human users, but we are grateful that our staff stay vigilant to keep us safe.
If you ever receive a suspicious email and wish to clarify that it is genuine, you can simply follow the below steps to verify if you have an authentic email from us, or anyone else:
- Double-click a suspicious email message to open it outside of the Reading Pane.
- Click File > Properties
- Header information appears in the Internet headers box.
An Example of Spoofing, Recently Caught by AFA Staff
We recently thwarted the efforts of a rascal spoofer, who was masquerading as our MD, Mr Brobyn. 
A quick review of the Email Message Headers revealed the culprit and stopped them in their tracks.
Subject: Wire Transfer
From: “Peter Brobyn” <peter.brobyn@atlasfurnitureasia.com>
To: angela.lyu@atlasfurnitureasia.com
Reply-To: ceofounder114@gmail.com
To show you just how easy it is to carry out this relatively low-tech cyber-attack, the scammer would need to write code similar to this:
<?php $to = 'unsuspecting@customer.com'; $subject = 'Check Message Headers to Avoid Scams!'; $message = 'Hi there! Please send us $25,986.00 by wire transfer now.'; $headers = 'From: peter@atlasfurnituresasia.com' . "\r\n" . 'Reply-To: scammer@googlemail.com' . "\r\n" . 'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion(); mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers); ?>
So you can see that they simply enter the ‘From’ value as whatever they want to enter, hoping that you don’t notice when you click ‘reply’ that you’re not replying to Peter at all – taken from https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php.
We are then able to confirm that this comes from a source external to Atlas Furniture Asia (Google Mail, in this case – a classic hot-bed for scammers and spammers).
We have reported this email address to both Microsoft (who run our mail servers) and Google (who are hosting this criminal), but we know that when this account is closed, Google customers will simply open 10 more. All we can do is stay as vigilant as possible and share as much knowledge with our friends, peers and loved ones to hold back the wave that is cyber-crime.
Wish you all stay safe and alert and please do not hesitate to contact us if there is anything we can answer or help clarify.