Securing Business Emails From Business Email Compromise

Business Email Compromise, or BEC attacks are becoming more widespread due to their simplicity and effectiveness as it's deemed the $26 billion scam. As that's how much these attacks stole in three years by attackers simply asking victims for money or sensitive information. BEC scams most commonly deceive victims and to believing they're communicating with an authority figure.

Such as a CEO or CFO, without spending time building malware and malicious links or attachments. When these threat actors convince victims that they are authority figures, they attempt to steal victims' valuables with methods like urgent payment requests. Bogus past due statements, fraudulent wiring instructions, and more as a result of the extensive research that attackers invest in crafting these malicious campaigns and their exploitation of trustworthy relationships, I.

BEC emails can be highly difficult to recognize and block to help you avoid being a victim. Let Guardian Digital educate you on how a BEC attack is carried out. Phase one is preparation when planning a BEC attack. Threat actors start to create a target list and conduct extensive research on each one of their targets, and they can locate all the information they need by looking through publicized corporate databases, websites, and social media profiles.

Or they could exploit corporate data breach. The malicious actors familiarize themselves with the key people and their relationships within these organizations so they can leverage authority and trust to get victims to interact with their fraudulent emails. Phase two, execution: Cybercriminals Launch BEC campaigns targeting the victims they've identified in their target list. Emails sent in these campaigns do not need malicious links or attachments containing malware to deceive recipients.

Instead, threat actors use stealthy impersonation tactics like spoofing, lookalike domains, or display name deception. To trick victims into interacting with or responding to their fraudulent emails by changing their names to appear similar to those being impersonated.

Having an email security solution capable of identifying and intercepting BEC attacks and other malicious threats in real time can mitigate risk and provide you and your organization. With peace of mind, guardian Digital OnGuard Cloud email security makes email safer for business, leveraging technology that proactively learns and distributes defenses for the specific threats targeting your company along with the expert ongoing system management required to keep your business secure.

Phase three Deception Tricked by the attacker's deceptive social engineering techniques designed to convince the victim to take immediate action By impersonating an individual of authority such as the CEO or CFO of a target organization, the victim falls for the scam. There are many ways that this scam is performed, as threat actors could convince a victim who works in finance to transfer money to an account owned by the threat actor.

Or they could even urgently request for the victim to pay fees due to a vendor and hook the request to the threat actor's bank account. Phase four, action. Now it's time for attackers to reap the rewards. Of their malicious efforts, urgency, authority and trust convinced the victim to proceed with the request in the malicious email, often leading to a data breach of hefty financial loss for the target organization.