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.
Business email compromise (BEC) is a term that encompasses a variety of techniques and tactics that cybercriminals leverage to obtain money or data via identity deception. Despite the evolution and repurposing of this suite of associated tactics, one constant has remained throughout—the correspondence between scammer and victim is done, almost without exception, over email.
Phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and other email attacks still involve display name deception—with Microsoft, and Amazon are still impersonated in many of these identity deception attacks.
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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.
You’ve seen headlines like "Facebook and Google were Scammed Out of $100 Million" and "Equifax's Massive Data Breach Has Cost the Company $4 Billion So Far."
After the typical malicious email attack is launched, its first victim will be compromised in under 4 minutes. Now, emerging, predictive models may point to new ways to neutralize that threat.
Data science may soon be able to predict when the next email fraud attack will hit your company's inboxes. But why should we care?
After all, what's the value of being able to predict these assaults? Is an attack via email still even relevant in the age of Slack, Microsoft Teams and other business messaging apps?
