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...

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...

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...

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the Microsoft Security blog and has been republished here. You already know that email is the number one attack vector for cybercriminals. But what you might not know is that without a standard email security protocol called Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance ( DMARC ), your organization is open to the phishing attacks that...

Receipts and invoices—two accounting powerhouses that require little introduction. But step a little further into the world of finance and accounts, and you can quickly become a fish out of water, as the terminology to this numerical land seems to multiply exponentially. That said, in some of our recent active defense engagements with BEC cybercriminals, we have observed a new way scammers are...

There is no denying that business email compromise (BEC) is big business, with losses exceeding a billion dollars in the United States in the last year alone. Globally, BEC attacks have cost more than $13 billion in the last five years. Chances are likely that you’ve probably been a recipient of one of these social-engineered emails yourself. But the question remains… who is behind these...

You likely have a fraudulent email from a business email compromise (BEC) scammer sitting in your inbox, and you may not realize it. However, recent research from the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) has shown that these advanced phishing attacks increasingly possess a handful of commonalities, making them easier to spot—which is good news considering their popularity. There are more BEC...

One of the trends that has been slowly creeping up across the BEC threat landscape is that actors are using other techniques in order to get money outside of an organization. While a traditional BEC attack includes instructions for wiring money outside of the organization, more and more actors are asking for a large number of gift cards instead of the classical request of “Please wire $30,000 to...

Business email compromise (BEC) fraud is a lucrative venture, and now that industry is expanding in a troubling way—by lowering the barrier to entry so that anyone with a couple hundred bucks can outsource a BEC attack. BEC criminals are organized, behaving in many ways like legitimate businesses . And just like any successful company in a growing industry, these criminals are looking to add...

Mergers and acquisitions can build your company's value overnight, but business email compromise (BEC) and data breaches can tear it down just as quickly. Too often, M&A announcements are followed by waves of BEC attacks against the companies involved, or by news that the target company was the victim of a data breach. To get the most value from a merger or acquisition, you need to know how to...