Today SAP Concur announced the results of its review into the costs of business expenses for the 23/24 financial year, which showed a 34 per cent increase in the cost of the average expense transaction compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019, likely driven by rising inflation.
This is more than four times the 8.1 per cent inflationary rate at the peak of Canadian inflation in June 2022. This demonstrates that Canada, in particular, has been hit harder than average by inflationary increases compared to the rest of the world. Using SAP Concur data from thousands of businesses across Canada, the company has been able to pinpoint some of the main areas where businesses face rising costs and paint a clearer picture on where inflation is damaging profits.
The biggest culprits for rising costs came from gas, car hire and ground transportation which rose 40 percent, 36 per cent and 35 per cent respectively. Similarly, the cost of entertainment also saw a large inflationary rise, coming in at a 35 per cent increase. But the cost of train transportation took the top spot as the biggest expense for businesses, amassing 85 per cent of the total expense amount.
Through SAP Concur’s analysis, it’s clear that businesses across the board are facing real increments in their additional costs. Most of which are often unseen or unaccounted for early on in the financial planning process. Chris Juneau, head of market strategy at SAP Concur said “For all businesses, the costs of operating in the current global market has become trickier with time and the 23/24 financial year was no exception. As the end of the year approaches, now is the time that finance managers and business leaders need to be analysing their outgoings, forecasting for the next financial year and re-evaluating policies to deliver a more robust year ahead.”
To ensure the smooth management of finances in 24/25, finance leaders need to take advantage of every spending moment to navigate times of change. Through the implementation of expense management systems, businesses need to look at ways in which they can better control expenditure. Whether that’s through greater monitoring of expense compliance, improving visibility or improving data driven decision making, finance leaders can take active steps to gain better control for the new financial year.
You can have a look at their write up on this topic here.
Malicious USPS Phishing Sites Exceed The Traffic Of The Real Site
Posted in Commentary with tags Akamai on April 29, 2024 by itnerdAccording to a recent blog post by Akamai Technologies, security researchers analyzing phishing campaigns targeting the United States Postal Service saw traffic to the fake domains similar to that of the legitimate site and during the holidays it “greatly exceeded legitimate traffic”.
Akamai started observing USPS-themed phishing last October after an employee received a suspicious text that redirected to a site containing malicious JavaScript code. During the 2023 holiday season, researchers observed a significant volume of DNS queries going to “combosquatting” domains that impersonated the USPS service.
The design of the fake pages appears as exact replicas of the actual USPS site even with realistic tracking pages with status updates. The total queries generated by these malicious websites between October 2023 and February 2024 is over 1,128,146, just short of the 1,181,235 queries recorded for the legitimate USPS site. Meanwhile, the traffic to malicious domains from November to December was higher compared to the legitimate one.
Akamai only focused this research on USPS, so the scale of these combosquatting campaigns could encompass other postal brands and likely be larger.
Dave Ratner, CEO, HYAS had this to say:
“Attacks involving typosquatting, combosquatting, or look-alike domains are increasing in nature and can be highly effective as individuals often don’t inspect the domain name itself closely enough. This can be made more complicated and difficult to detect with the use of different character sets like punycode which can make the difference between the legitimate and fake domain very hard, if at all possible, to detect by visual inspection. This is one of the reasons that Protective DNS solutions are so vital today, because they know the legitimate domains from the fake ones and can be the critical difference between a successful attack and a failed attempt.”
This is pretty insane. The fact that the real USPS site gets less traffic than fake ones shows that this is a huge problem that really needs to be addressed. I am not sure how one would address this, but it’s high time to figure it out.
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