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Email: every employee’s favorite task.
(Not.)
Whether we like it or not, email is at the core of most information jobs in the world. There are about 200 million business email accounts in the U.S. alone — all of which are prime targets for hackers.
Business email compromise (BEC) is just what it sounds like: An unauthorized entity gains access to a business email account.
That bad actor then uses that access to impersonate the legitimate account owner and perform all sorts of trickery — from data theft and financial fraud to ransom requests.
Businesses email compromise can lead to some hefty bills. The average cost of a data breach has reached an all-time high of $4.45 million. That’s more than a 15% increase from 2020 alone.
But BEC is rarely as dramatic as movies depict it: someone shouting “I’m in!” and then immediately wreaking havoc.
Instead, BEC is often a more insidious, slow-moving compromise — which can make it even more dangerous.
Once a bad actor has broken into a business email, they don’t just steal something and move on. They bide their time — sometimes for weeks or even months.
In that time, the hacker can keep track of everyone the account owner emails. The bad actor will know things like:
Now, unless the hacker has plans to order sushi for all their friends on the end user’s dime, that last one might not be very useful. But the rest of that information? Hacker gold.
With all that data, the cybercriminal can identify — and pursue — their next victim.
Unfortunately, one business email compromise is rarely ever just one event with a clear start and endpoint. Instead, that first compromise is usually the first step of a nasty cycle.
Here’s how that cycle usually goes:
What’s at stake in this cycle?
Well, a lot of money, especially depending on the size of the organization. This could be in the form of direct financial theft. Or, an organization could even face civil liability for losses of sensitive data.
Cloud providers such as Microsoft explicitly do not take responsibility for losses on its platform, even if a business’s 365 account is hacked.
On top of that, your customer’s reputation is at stake. Organizations who get duped out of millions of dollars often make the news — and that’s not the kind of public relations you want.
Related Content: How the team at Technology Advisory Group prevented a customer from paying a fake $20,000 invoice.
Without the right tools in place to prevent attacks, business email compromise can become a never-ending doom loop: one attack leads to another leads to another.
Platforms like SaaS Alerts can break that chain. In fact, SaaS Alerts blocked about 8,000 BEC events in 2023 alone.
To protect your customers from BEC, you need:
Traditionally, you had to manually take action, sometimes responding to alerts in the middle of the night. But with SaaS Alerts, you can proactively set up automated remediation, which will shut down a compromised account within seconds, 24/7/365.
With robust reporting capabilities, SaaS Alerts can help facilitate that training. For your customers, there’s no kick in the pants quite like a report of how many times hackers have attempted to compromise the organization’s email accounts.
