Resources

Blog

Microsoft Office 365 + Secure Email Cloud: All You Need in a Cloud-First World

You’ve heard the statistics…more than 70% of all business users will be provisioned with cloud office applications in the next two years, including email. It’s an overdue modernization that eliminates physical infrastructure to drive cost savings and integrate services for improved productivity Chasing this move, cybercriminals intent on account takeover are evolving their tactics, targeting end...
Blog

How to Prevent Phishing Attacks that Target Your Customers with DMARC and Office 365

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...
Blog

Ensuring DMARC Compliance for Third-Party Senders

Marketo. Salesforce. Eloqua. Bamboo HR. Zendesk. It only takes a minute to realize how much organizations love third-party senders. They are typically responsible for sending our important customer notifications, marketing promotions, prospecting emails, and even employee information. Because their mail is so important to your business, we should do what we can to help them become DMARC compliant...
Blog

Weaponizing Accounts Receivable

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...
Blog

From One to Many: Scattered Canary Evolves from One-Man Startup to BEC Enterprise

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...
Press Release

Agari Joins Microsoft Intelligent Security Association Program

FOSTER CITY, Calif. – May 15, 2019—Agari, the next-generation Secure Email Cloud that restores trust to the inbox, today announced that it has joined the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association . This is yet another step towards collaboration that will enable DMARC reporting capabilities for Microsoft Office 365 customers. “As a Microsoft Partner, Agari actively participates in the Microsoft...
Blog

Quick, Urgent, Request: Agari Research Reveals Top Ten Subject Lines Used for BEC

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...
Blog

Current Email Architecture Transformation Raises the Bar for Security

Enterprise email architecture is evolving, which is good news for cybercriminals. Legacy secure email gateways (SEGs) simply don't provide full protection from today’s evolving and costly attacks, and cloud-based email requires a new security approach. In contrast, the next generation of email security—the AI-powered Secure Email Cloud —gives organizations more comprehensive security and better...
Blog

The Time is Now: Underscoring the Importance of DMARC for State and Local Governments

Scammers know that impersonating a trusted government agency is an extremely effective way to trick or scare victims into handing over money, personal data, or sensitive information. In many cases, it’s all too easy for cybercriminals to use the agency’s own domains to send authentic-looking phishing emails to constituents and contractors. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security announced...
Blog

Why iTunes? A Look into Gift Cards as an Emerging BEC Cash Out Method

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...
Blog

Protecting our Clients from Email Spoofing: Our DMARC Journey

This post originally appeared on the Armadillo Blog and has been lightly edited for clarity. Most organisations have been successful in blocking malicious emails targeted at their employees, at least to some extent. Various on-premise and cloud providers exist to take care of anti-spam, anti-virus, reputation scores, and advanced features such as sandboxing of executables. As a service provider...
Blog

New “BEC-as-a-Service” Trend Means Just About Anyone Can Launch an Attack

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...
Blog

M&As Put Your Company at Risk for BEC Losses and Data Breach Liability

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...
Blog

The ROI of Protecting Your Brand, Customers and Partners from Phishing

Over the past 6 months, 100% of Agari customer brands and more than 80% of their domains have been the target of consumer phishing or B2B phishing attacks impersonating their brand to commit fraud. While the cost of phishing attacks isn't always visible, there are very real costs to businesses in the form of email deliverability, brand value and fraud costs. The root cause of this problem is that...
Press Release

Agari Summer '18 Release Extends Protection against Advanced Deception Attacks

FOSTER CITY, Calif., June 13, 2018 – Agari, a leader in Identity Deception Protection solutions, today announced its Summer ’18 Release, which extends the protection of the Agari Email Trust Platform™ against advanced identity deception attacks. Major enhancements in this release include attachment analysis for improved account takeover detection, an interactive threat taxonomy for granular attack...
Blog

Email Headers Explained: Understanding Email Header Information

With the surge of phishing and other advanced email attacks, you can’t be too careful when it comes to your inbound email messages. Beyond viewing the basic information provided, you should make it a habit of viewing and understanding your emails' full headers.
Press Release

How to Become Unphishable

As phishing attacks continue unabated, vendors and banks alike are scrambling to find better solutions. In a warning issued this week, the FBI said it’s seen a 270% increase in identified victims and exposed losses due to business email compromise since January 2015. Business email compromise or “CEO fraud” phishing targets businesses that frequently perform wire transfers. Perpetrators compromise...
Press Release

New Cybersecurity Book Highlights Growing Threat of Social Engineering

Book Offers Tools and Techniques to Prevent Social Engineering-based Email Attacks SAN MATEO, Calif. – Dec. 13, 2016 – Agari , a leading cybersecurity company, today announced the release of a new book by Agari Chief Scientist Markus Jakobsson and other cybersecurity thought leaders, Understanding Social Engineering Based Scams . The book describes the increased use of social engineering for email...
Blog

Don’t Let Your Customers Be Fooled By Cousin Domains

In the last five years, we’ve all become far too familiar with it – hackers spoofing a company’s domain and therefore tarnishing the brand, bad actors attempting to infect our computers with malware, and criminals sending millions of spam messages. As if this isn’t enough, now there is a whole group of people working to outsmart companies AND their customers by using cousin domains to fool...
Blog

What is Identifier Alignment?

When you begin to work with DMARC, you realize just how important identifier alignment is. Identifier alignment forces the domains authenticated by SPF and DKIM to have a relationship to the "header From" domain. Header From Domain and the MailFrom domain are different? Yes, they are! Hearing these terms can confuse people. They sound like the same thing, but in reality they are not. The...