Employers: A cautionary tale about new cyber threats involving employee handbooks

Clark Hill has a robust cybersecurity and privacy practice group and a team of employment attorneys. The cyber unit’s work benefits all practice areas they learn about the newest risks facing clients. Recently, their work has uncovered a devious hacker ploy involving electronic distributions of employee handbooks.

Cybercriminals are obtaining copies of real or fake employee handbooks and distributing them by email, spoofing a legitimate employer email address so that the email and its attachment appear authentic. The email asks the employee to scan a QR code, which is described as a way to acknowledge receipt of the handbook. When scanned, the QR codes direct the recipient to a malicious website that impersonates a legitimate corporate login portal, such as Microsoft 365 or even your own Company’s HR portal. The QR code requires the employee to provide user credentials, which the hacker then uses to gain access to the email environment. This scheme can also be used to install malware when the QR code is accessed.

Companies may wish to engage preventative strategies. For example,

• Provide email security training using this ploy as a case study
• Communicate to employees how and when handbooks are distributed and the manner in which acknowledgments are collected
• Engage with your IT Department on best practices for email and business records security, the use of multi-factor authentication, and anti-malware software
• Training employees that handbooks are company property and are not to be disseminated outside of the company
• Engage with payroll providers or vendors of your HRIS software about the security of portals and company documents stored on their sites

If you have questions about this alert or how to best protect yourself from threat actors seeking unauthorized access to your internal systems, please contact Vanessa Kelly, Maria Dwyer or Melissa Ventrone, or the Clark Hill attorney with whom you work.

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