Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a type of cyberattack where a threat actor impersonates a trusted person—such as a business owner, executive, employee, or vendor—to trick someone into sending money, sensitive data, or login credentials.

These attacks typically do not contain malware or obvious red flags. Instead, they rely on social engineering, using realistic emails, timing, and context to appear legitimate. Common examples include:

• Fake invoice or payment change requests
• Urgent wire transfer instructions from an “executive”
• Requests for payroll or sensitive employee information

Because these emails often look authentic and come from spoofed or compromised accounts, they can bypass traditional spam filters.

BEC is one of the leading causes of financial loss for businesses today, making strong email security and user awareness critical to preventing these attacks.

Act quickly—time is critical to limiting financial loss and further damage:

• Immediately contact your bank or financial institution to attempt to stop or recall any fraudulent transactions
• Notify your IT provider or security team to begin an incident response and secure affected accounts
• Reset passwords for all impacted users and enforce multi-factor authentication if not already in place
• Review email accounts for unauthorized access, forwarding rules, or suspicious activity
• Inform affected employees, vendors, or clients so they can be alert for additional fraudulent communications
• Report the incident to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at ic3.gov

After the immediate response, it’s important to perform a full review of how the incident occurred and implement stronger controls to prevent it from happening again.

Start by putting safeguards in place that reduce the risk of both human error and technical gaps:

• Verify all financial requests using a secondary method, such as a phone call to a known, trusted number
• Train staff to recognize suspicious or unusual email requests, especially those involving urgency or changes to payment details
• Implement multi-factor authentication on all email and critical business systems
• Ensure your domain is properly secured to prevent impersonation and spoofing
• Establish clear internal procedures for handling payments, vendor changes, and sensitive data requests

Most importantly, do not rely on users alone. A layered approach that combines user awareness, strong policies, and advanced email security controls is the most effective way to prevent these types of attacks.

Phishing is a type of cyberattack where an attacker sends a fraudulent email (or message) that appears to come from a trusted source—such as Microsoft, a bank, a vendor, or even someone within your organization—in an attempt to trick you into taking action.

This usually involves:

• Clicking a malicious link
• Entering login credentials on a fake website
• Downloading an infected attachment

The goal is to steal sensitive information, gain access to accounts, or install malware.

Modern phishing attacks are often highly convincing, using real logos, familiar language, and urgent requests—making them difficult to detect without proper security controls and user awareness.

A quality anti-phishing solution offers an array of benefits like:

• Clear, real-time threat data
• Fast, accurate alerts to IT admins
• A thorough message analysis
• Automated productivity tools that make management easy
• Tools to help users make better decisions
• Warnings at the top of messages to alert users of potential danger
• An easy way for users to report a phishing attempt or mark a message as safe
• A minimal false positive rate Constant accuracy improvement

Anti-phishing protection is the security measures that organizations take to prevent or mitigate a phishing attack. This can be provided by email security software that can do things like stop the delivery of email to an end user by placing malicious messages into quarantine.