Beware of bogus customer survey

There is a fake customer survey making the rounds, warns one provincial public insurer.

Risk Management News

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There is a fake customer survey making the rounds, warns one provincial public insurer.

Manitoba Public Insurance has issued a warning for customers not to respond to a customer survey that arrives in a pop-up window within their Internet browser.

“This is an adware-generated survey and has no association with our company,” states MaryAnn Kempe, vice president of business development, communications and chief product officer at Manitoba Public Insurance in a warning statement on the insurer’s website. “We became aware of this advertisement after being contacted by people who have viewed the pop-up in their browser. Customers should not respond to this survey. Nor should they ever share personal information.”

Although the MPI does conduct customer-satisfaction polling, says Kempe, “such surveys are not conducted via email.”

The message encourages people to complete the survey with a promise of a gift worth more than $50 and is intended to generate traffic and sales leads for dubious sites.

“Having this pop-up appear on your computer may indicate that malicious code has been installed,” says Kempe, “and you should seek the assistance of a technical expert to assist in its removal.”

Concerns over email security and fraud are a concern and a priority of the federal government.

A security exercise launched by the federal Justice Department in December had almost half the staff of 5,000 employees clicking on a phoney phishing email link.

The internal survey revealed almost 2,000 staff were tricked into clicking on a phoney phishing link in their email, created by their own department – raising questions about the security of sensitive information, and providing brokers with another headline to share with business clients who remain unconvinced on the value of cyber liability insurance. (continued.)
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The Ponemon Institute’s 2013 survey, Exposing the Cybersecurity Cracks: A Global Perspective, garnered responses from 4,881 information technology security practitioners in Canada and 14 other countries and reveals that 56 per cent of Canadian respondents said cyber threats “sometimes fall through the cracks” of existing security measures at their firms.

An estimated 156 million of these phishing emails are sent daily, and anyone duped into clicking on the embedded link risks transferring confidential information — such as online banking passwords — to criminals.
 

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