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Defending Against The $5B Cybersecurity Threat – Business Email Compromise

January 5, 2018

If an average employee at your company got an email from an executive with an urgent request, would they question whether the email was coming from the actual sender? They probably wouldn’t. The reality is that most people would act on the request because of its time-sensitive nature. They assume that the IT team has the right technology in place to validate email senders so they can focus on doing their work. But this is why attackers succeed.

Their target thinks the email is coming from someone they trust and consequently, their organization gets breached. This type of attack is called Business Email Compromise (BEC), email spoofing or spoof abuse. The FBI estimates it has cost companies $5.3B globally – far more than the $1B in 2016 for ransomware.

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