Business Email Compromise Attacks Spike 269%

library
crime | hacking | security

A new Mimecast report finds a significant uptick in BEC attacks, malware attachments, and spam landing in target inboxes.

Business email compromise (BEC) ramped up 269% from last quarter to this quarter, according to Mimecast’s latest Email Security Risk Assessment (ESRA). This quarter showed a massive spike in emails containing dangerous file types, malware attachments, and spam in target inboxes.

The quarterly report reviewed more than 260 million emails from more than 480,000 users. Of the emails that were scanned by various email security systems and successfully delivered, 28.8 million were spam, 28,808 contained malware attachments, and 28,726 contained dangerous file types. More than 60,000 of these messages contained BEC, or impersonation fraud, scams.

BEC scams continue to plague organizations because they can easily slip past traditional security systems. Savvy attackers continue to build on their schemes with increasingly subtle strategies, too.For example, vendor email compromise (VEC), a newly discovered technique, involves the intruder sitting on a target network and observing communications to better craft fraudulent messages.