Have you ever received a blank email from someone you don’t know? If you have, it may have been from a cybercriminal making sure your email account is legitimate prior to a Business Email Compromise (BEC) attack. Agari and PhishLabs define BEC as any response-based spear phishing attack involving the impersonation of a trusted party to trick victims into making an unauthorized financial...
In this presentation, we’ll reveal the latest from our 2022 Email Fraud and Identity Trends report, focusing on Customer Phishing and DMARC Enforcement.
Strengthen Your Security Posture With a continually evolving threat landscape, organizations are under increased pressure to manage security vulnerabilities. They often need to deploy multiple threat intelligence feeds to assist in this process by identifying common indicators of compromise (IOC) and indicators of attack (IOA) and then recommending the necessary steps to prevent attack or...
Why would a cybercriminal spend time developing malware when he can simply trick unsuspecting users into handing over their passwords? Why would a threat actor spend her money and resources on ransomware, when she can get that same information through a compromised account? It’s a good question, and exactly what the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division wanted to discover. In a growing trend known as...
Generally defined, cyber threat intelligence is information used to better understand possible digital threats that might target your organization. This data will help identify threats in order to prevent security breaches in the future. Why Cyber Threat Intelligence is Important Having a system in place that can produce threat intelligence is critical to staying ahead of digital threats, as well...
Three months ago, when I joined Agari as the Chief Marketing Officer, I knew that I was joining a leader in email security. I knew this partially because I worked for Agari from 2016-2019 during an exciting time of change for the company. But my time away from Agari made me realize how much it has to offer its customers and partners, which is ultimately why I decided to return. And I’m thrilled to...
In July 2020, we published a report on a Russian-based BEC group we called Cosmic Lynx . In that report , we described the tactics used by the group, which included its targeting of senior executives at large companies with a global footprint and how it uses mergers and acquisitions (M&A) themes in its BEC email lures. Shortly after we published the report, we saw a significant decrease in Cosmic...
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...
For a growing number of email marketers, it may be "BIMI or bust." As of June 30, nearly 5,300 companies have adopted Brand Indicators for Message Identification ( BIMI ), a new email standard for showcasing a brand's logo next to its email messages in recipient inboxes, with built-in protections against phishing-based brand spoofing. The tally reflects a 3.8X increase in the number of brands...
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 growing body of evidence suggests employees throughout the healthcare sector may be uniquely vulnerable to phishing attacks. If finding itself a growing target for cybercriminals weren’t bad enough, the industry is also seeing associated lawsuits piling up. Montana-based Kalispell Regional Healthcare was recently hit with a suit after it disclosed that multiple employees had fallen victim to...
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...
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...