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.
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.
Every year, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, also known as IC3, publishes an annual report looking at the different types of internet-based crimes reported to the FBI. Over the last year, victims around the globe lost $2.71 billion to all types of cybercrime, which includes lottery scams, hacktivism, gambling fraud, malware, ransomware attacks, and tech support fraud, among others.
Historically, business email compromise (BEC) threat actors have used wire transfers as a means to steal money from businesses. Impersonating a trusted contact, usually a company executive, a scammer requests that a fictitious vendor get paid by sending money to a bank account controlled by the scammer or an associate.
It’s like clockwork. Every year around tax time security vendors (even us!) push out warnings about W-2 forms being stolen at tax time, and every year dozens of organizations disclose that someone inside of their organization fell victim to a BEC scam where actors were asking for W-2 information.
The April 15th deadline to file taxes in the United States is almost here, which means Tax Day phishing operations are in high gear. Impersonating the IRS is a year-round favorite tactic for cybercriminals. In fact, the IRS was the third most-impersonated brand in Q4 2018. But with the April 15th deadline on the horizon, criminals know that now is the perfect time to exploit anxiety, distraction, and time pressure to snare more victims.
When it comes to sharing threat intelligence with one another, organizations tend to play the game differently. Some prefer to play the “secret squirrel game,” where attribution is something so sacred that names of actors can only be whispered behind closed doors. In other cases, data is bought on the dark underbellies of the Internet and then sold back to organizations as threat intelligence. For others, like the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division, information is shared amongst trusted individuals who can use it to stop cybercrime and bring criminals to justice.
In December, the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) published a report on a business email compromise group of cybercriminals we call London Blue.
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.
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.
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