Emails are a vital part of every modern organisation. They form the backbone of inter-company communication and are one of the most essential everyday functions in the contemporary business world. But, like everything else in the modern world, they can also pose a risk to your organisation.
Business Email Compromise is a scam that aims to trick businesses through emails to gain credentials and ultimately steal from your organisation. This is a dangerous prospect for any business; ensuring you know the risk is vital.
In this blog, we will go over everything you need to know about Business Email Compromise and how your organisation can protect itself from being targeted by malicious actors using this strategy to attack your business.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a hazardous attack that aims to specifically target businesses through email, and try to gain money or credentials from personnel within your organisation.
BEC is a social engineering attack that uses sophisticated impersonation attacks to pretend to be someone important to your business, for example, a CEO, vendor, or client, to make an employee give away vital information.
With this, the attacker will do extensive research to ensure their email looks incredibly realistic and target specific people within your organisation. This makes it incredibly easy to fall victim to, unlike phishing, which casts a wide net; these attacks are designed for the target and so will have a lot more attention to detail.
On top of this, attackers can create more realistic graphics and even spoof email addresses, meaning that simply checking the email can sometimes just not be enough to protect you. There are other ways to protect yourself that will ensure that even in the case of a successful attack, you have other prevention methods in place.
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly answering many questions that businesses have when it comes to using technology to its maximum potential. Part of this is security, AI can predict and prevent security threats before they happen, and the same can be said for your email security.
Using AI to protect your emails will give you access to a proactive security system that will identify impersonation attempts and point out any suspicious activity in your email inbox. This is the best way to ensure that you don’t fall victim to high-level impersonation scams like BEC and will ensure that you’re aware of anything suspicious.
If an attack succeeds, it’s essential to have a stopgap in place to ensure that the attack can’t do any damage. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is vital to this, as it’s another check that must be passed for an attacker to access your information.
This means that it provides another window for an employee to be able to smell that something is suspicious; anyone asking for MFA verification is dangerous and should be treated as a threat. However, it also means that if they do get password credentials, they’ll be stopped by MFA verification.
Ultimately, MFA is vital and easy to implement. There’s no reason not to have implemented it into your organisation already, and MFA’s benefits are invaluable.
The Human Firewall is the idea that your organisation’s team’s collective knowledge and intuition can work together to prevent cyberattacks. After all, education is one of the most critical factors in beating cyber attackers, and educating your employees will ensure that they can take action proactively.
The way to ensure this in your organisation is by training and ensuring that everyone is aware of their role in cybersecurity. This will create a security-conscious culture within your company, building up your human firewall and ensuring that everyone is aware of the security risks you face.
Email authentication is also vital to protecting your organisation from BEC. The three authentication methods;
It will help you verify the authenticity of senders, meaning that you can spot any spoofing as it happens.
While attackers can bypass authentication methods, it is a lot harder. Combined with other aforementioned techniques, it can play a core role in stopping attackers from successfully attacking.
As the future comes along, being able to future-proof your organisation and ensure that your email security level is high as time goes on is vital. Here are some steps that you can take to futureproof your email security —
Business Email Compromise is a real threat to businesses, and you must be informed about staying safe. These technologies will ensure you have the upper hand against any attackers looking to threaten your company.
If you want to get started with email security but need support, contact us today. We’re here to help and will ensure you have all the support you need to protect your business every step of the way.
Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.