What is email spoofing, how does it work, and why is it so dangerous to your company? We’ll explain everything you need to proactively stop attackers from spoofing your email address. Email Spoofing: What Is It? Email spoofing is when a fraudster forges an email header’s ‘From’ address to make it appear as if it was sent by someone else, usually a known contact like a high-level executive or...

This post originally appeared on Medium and is published here courtesy of Ronnie Tokazowski. For more by Ronnie, follow him on Twitter @iHeartMalware . If you’re reading this and are in the middle of an incident, go to the first bullet now . The rest can wait. Malware incidents suck, but if you want to know what it’s like responding to a BEC incident, triple the carnage, shake the snow globe, set...

Business email compromise ( BEC ) actors are exploring alternative cash-out methods for spiriting away the profits from their crimes. Traditional bank accounts have long been the go-to choice for email scammers seeking to cash out the funds they've pilfered from organizations they victimize. Just since 2016, BEC groups have defrauded businesses out of more than $26 billion worldwide. But over the...

Here we’ll cover what BEC attacks are, how they work, what they usually look like, and how to handle them. What is a BEC Attack? 7 Common BEC Attack Patterns Top Identity Deception Techniques How Can BEC Attacks be Stopped? What's the Best Way to Recover From a BEC Attack? What is a BEC Attack? First, let me explain what a BEC attack is. In short, Business Email Compromise phishing occurs when...

Over the last five years, Business Email Compromise (BEC) has evolved into the predominant cyber threat businesses face today. Since 2016, businesses have lost at least $26 billion as a result of BEC scams and, based on the most recent FBI IC3 report , losses from BEC attacks grew another 37 percent in 2019—accounting for 40 percent of all cybercrime losses over the course of the year. The...

With cyber gangs leveraging business email compromise (BEC) attacks that actively exploit their targets' level of DMARC adoption, CISOs have been ratcheting up email security. Until now, the need to dial up defenses against imposters posing as senior executives in email attacks has been increasingly forcing legitimate business correspondence into quarantine. The chain reaction kneecaps commerce...

Blocking SendGrid email traffic isn't a realistic option for most businesses hit by a barrage of phishing attacks emanating from compromised accounts at the Twilio-owned email service provider in recent months. Instead, Agari leverages a strategic data modeling approach to neutralize the threat while enabling legitimate SendGrid-distributed emails to safely reach employee inboxes. More on that in...

If you haven't deployed Domain-based Messaging Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) to protect your brand from being impersonated in phishing scams, there are pressing reasons to jump on it now. Without a doubt, these are extraordinary times for individuals and organizations alike as we've been forced to change the way we work, shop, play, and live seemingly overnight, and for far...

In the first reported case of its kind, a phishing ring in Eastern Europe is exploiting companies' own Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance ( DMARC ) controls to impersonate CEOs in business email compromise (BEC) scams worth millions. As detailed in our new threat actor dossier on a group we call Cosmic Lynx , the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) has identified...

A seismic shift in the email threat landscape has CISOs bracing for sophisticated new forms of business email compromise (BEC) scams, as phishing's center of gravity begins to tilt from West African email scammers toward Russian and Eastern European cybercrime lords. As detailed in our new threat actor dossier on a threat group we call Cosmic Lynx , the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) has...

“At some point, Russian and Eastern European cybercriminals are going to start thinking to themselves, ‘Why am I spending all of this time and money setting up infrastructure and hiring malware developers when I can just send someone an email, ask them to send me money, and they’ll do it.’” For more than a year, this is a line we have used over and over again, expecting that some of the world’s...

With business email compromise (BEC) scams up sharply amid the coronavirus pandemic, CISOs have been forced to scour an expanding but largely inscrutable email threat landscape in hopes of fending off costly attacks—until now, that is. In an industry first, the new Agari Summer '20 Release offers CISOs access to real-world intelligence on specific phishing threats unique to their organizations...

A new Total Economic Impact (TEI) Study from Forrester finds that Agari Phishing Defense™ (APD) delivered results 36% faster than competing solutions, and results in a 97% ROI in just three years. But it turns out that's just the warm-up act. TEI reports are designed to help organizations accurately evaluate potential IT initiatives. In this instance, we commissioned the study so Forrester...

Amid a troubling rise in zero-day phishing attacks, recent research suggests that some companies may be making an ill-advised shift away from blocking advanced email threats to responding to them post-delivery. If true, the capitulation couldn't come at a worse time. Since January, cybercriminals taking advantage of the COVID-19 outbreak have been targeting businesses and individuals with an...

Are you protecting your remote workers against an endless barrage of COVID-19 related phishing attacks by requiring 2-factor authentication (2FA) to log into employee email accounts? Smart move—just don't let it give you a false sense of security.

Recently, news broke about how a sophisticated Nigerian cybercriminal organization has been committing mass unemployment fraud against a number of states, including Florida, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wyoming. Based on information uncovered by the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division, some, if not all, the actors behind these fraudulent schemes are likely...

Since the beginning of February, we have seen more than a 3,000% increase in Coronavirus-themed phishing attacks targeting our customers. The spike in attacks is as logical as it is repugnant. With an estimated 75 million employees more reliant than ever on email during the largest "work-from-home experiment" in history, phishing scammers and other threat actors seem hellbent on exploiting...

With 60 million corporate employees working remotely due to the Coronavirus outbreak, cybercriminals are switching up their tactics in business email compromise (BEC) scams. In what has been called the " world's largest work-from-home experiment ," organizations around the globe are being forced to quickly transition to a remote workforce, ready or not. Cybercriminals have opportunistically...

As if coronavirus hasn't put enough of a damper on vacation schedules this spring, corporate employees taking time off might want to rethink their "out of office" email settings for fear a different threat: Business Email Compromise ( BEC ) scams. Sure, the temptation to share humorous details about your big spring adventure can be irresistible for a certain species of corporate denizen...

Business email compromise (BEC) has become the predominant cyber threat businesses face today. These basic social engineering scams are having a huge impact, to the tune of more than $700 million every month. To make matters worse, the recently-released Internet Crime Report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center shows that BEC isn’t going away any time soon, as losses from BEC attacks...