Even though cybercriminals are known to attack just about anything nowadays, the reality is that these scammers are trying to focus mostly on those regions where a lot of money seems to be coming from. This is why the real estate world seems to be more and more appealing for them, with plenty of cybercriminals focusing on the real estate transactions all the time.
The fact that most of the real estate transactions in the first world countries take place in the online world or at least leave a trace there has managed to offer these cybercriminals a great opportunity to act as they see fit in the online world, and that on its own is a very impressive thing for sure.
Aside from tracking that info, the identity thieves are also trying to capture as much personal information as possible, all so that they can steal your identity as fast as possible. If you’re not careful what information you share in the online world, your life and credit can easily get ruined by such a scammer, and the entire outcome will not be pleasant at all.
This is why the real estate transactions are targeted by these malevolent persons, mainly because they involve using a lot of money and that on its own is a true appeal for them, since they can capture a lot of money very fast without having to spend a lot of time stealing. That’s one of the things that makes them steal, but another one is the damage that they can leave to any person as a whole. Let’s face it, real estate damage is by far the easiest one to pull off, and they can easily hamper with the legal stuff as well.
On top of that, commercial properties are vulnerable from attacks in their building control or automated systems, which makes them very insecure. If commercial building owners really want to protect their investment, they need to take cybersecurity seriously, otherwise the damage will be very large for sure.
Then there’s the fact that most information is sent via the cloud, so if a hacker reaches the cloud servers used by any company, they can easily get into transaction mails and a wide range of other information that should not be shared at all with anyone but the owners.
There are multiple other real estate scams out there, all designed to find out information such as credit card data, bank account info as well as other sensitive pieces of data that can be used to perform cybertheft. Unfortunately, the threat is becoming more and more real nowadays, so the only thing any real estate company can do is to further increase the efforts and bring in front a better data protection method, otherwise they will have to deal with some bad results in the long run!
Photo credit: Christiaan Colen / Sebastian Wagner
Source: National Association of Realtors
