Business E-mail Compromise (BEC) attacks are on the rise, with ever increasing sophistication. In 2020, the FBI reported that BEC caused losses in excess of $1.8 billion1.
Unlike other phishing attacks, significant effort by the bad actors is put into crafting multiple e-mails that will ensure a trained employee does what the criminal wants. The nature of the custom message, typically appearing to originate from a trusted source with high knowledge of the recipient’s business, is hard to detect with traditional techniques. Also, these attacks often do not contain URLs or attachments, which means there are fewer artefacts to indicate an attack.
1Source: FBI Internet Crime Report 2020 - https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2020_IC3Report.pdf
