- In May 2019, Dean Kinsman became an Assistant Legal Attache assigned to Cyber investigations for the FBI in U.S. Embassy, Bucharest, Romania.
Dean Kinsman started his career with the FBI in the Detroit Field Office in 2002 as a Cybercrime agent. From 2002-2009 he investigated criminal and national security computer intrusion cases in the Detroit Field office.
From 2009-2011, he was assigned to FBI Headquarters in the Cyber Division and participated in several coordinated multinational searches and arrests of international Cyber subjects.
In February 2012, he moved to the FBI Nashville Office to investigate cybercrime and became the supervisor of the Cybercrime squad in May 2017.
Prior to joining the FBI, Dean served as a Lieutenant in the Navy on a destroyer homeported in San Diego, California, and worked as a systems administrator and desktop support manager for the Perot Systems Corporation in Raleigh, North Carolina.
How do I prevent my company from getting hacked?
“I see three to four businesses hacked each week“, said Dean Kinsman last year, when he attended a Security Workshop in the USA.
The conclusions? Because we are working with lots of online information these days, hacking is just simpler and easier than ever.
Solutions: how can you solve these problems
- Education: Make sure your employees and clients are educated on everything from phishing emails to encryption, and realize the severity of these types of instances
- Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): stops 90% of hackers and is one of the best preventative measures you can take
- Communication: Find ways to get people from different departments within your organization to talk about solutions together.
“Businesses are being targeted by cyber criminals”
In an interview for News Channel 5 (2018), Dean Kinsman talked about how cyber criminals are figuring out new ways to get your money. Looks like this time they are targeting businesses through their email accounts.
They are called business e-mail compromise schemes, or BEC for short. According to the Dean, there has been a dramatic increase in those schemes. BEC schemes target businesses, and multiple Nashville businesses have already taken massive financial hits.
These criminals do their research and learn more about the employees who manage money and use the language specific to the company they are targeting.
“Pay attention to the email you’re actually receiving and who it’s from. Many times a subject in these scams will create a look-alike email address. What I mean by that, let’s say I sell widgets, and in the domain name where instead of an I in widgets, they’ll put a one,” Dean Kinsman for News Channel 5
- Back in 2018, Dean was a Supervisory Special Agent of the Cyber Crimes Squad in Nashville with the FBI
- Last year $675 million was reported stolen in these scams.
