KnowBe4 - [Heads Up] The New FedNow Service Opens Massive New Attack Surface

You may not have heard of this service planned for July 2023, but it promises a massive new social engineering attack surface. This is from their website:

"About the FedNowSM Service. The FedNow Service is a new instant payment infrastructure developed by the Federal Reserve that allows financial institutions of every size across the U.S. to provide safe and efficient instant payment services.

"Through financial institutions participating in the FedNow Service, businesses and individuals can send and receive instant payments in real time, around the clock, every day of the year. Financial institutions and their service  providers can use the service to provide innovative instant payment services to customers, and recipients will have full access to funds immediately, allowing for greater financial flexibility when making time-sensitive payments." This is the site: https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about.html

You can imagine the pandora's box this opens up. We at KnowBe4 ran an internal contest to come up with potential social engineering exploits and phishing templates. We have a bunch of very creative people working here, these are the top submissions:

from KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Blog https://blog.knowbe4.com/heads-up-the-new-fednow-service-opens-massive-new-attack-surface