It’s not news that cybercrime is a constant battle—large enterprises and small businesses everywhere are susceptible to a myriad of advanced email threats and socially engineered attacks, such as executive or brand impersonation. According to IC3’s Internet Crime Report, over $44 million in losses in 2021 were a direct result of malicious phishing and advanced email scams.

Social media threats targeting enterprises more than doubled last year. Attacks on the retail industry specifically have grown, as threat actors are targeting victims with impersonation and counterfeit ad campaigns.

With losses from business email compromise rising fast, the active defense movement is generating buzz—but what are the ramifications? Why just raise the shield without wielding the sword, too?

We all know that phishing attacks came fast and furious. Timed and tailored for maximum effect, these malicious email messages exploit the cruelest of social engineering tactics, preying on customer anxieties, especially in the aftermath of major crises.

Human resources departments are the epitome of task ownership, carefully and efficiently connecting an organization’s needs with that of its employees. Employees in HR are tasked with recruitment, onboarding, and employee relations, and oftentimes handle payroll and benefits. Because of their wide reach, threat actors are now turning their attention to this organizational pipeline as they continue to evolve their employee-to-employee attack vectors.

As the healthcare industry closes the books on 2018, it is still reeling from more than 327 major data breaches that exposed personal health information (PHI) on at least 9.8 million US citizens this past year.

According to a public service announcement issued by the FBI, college students across the United States continue to be targeted in a common email phishing scam that lures students in with the promise of employment.

Recent research conducted by Agari showed that Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks are running rampant with 96% of organizations experiencing an attack during the second half of 2017. To compile the report, Agari analyzed over 1 billion emails that were considered safe by conventional security technologies.