Business Email Compromise: When Fake Emails Look Real

Leading MTSP Helps Block Email-Based Attacks, the
Preferred Vector for Hackers

For years, employees were told to look for obvious warning signs in a suspicious email: misspelled words, poor grammar, strange formatting, or awkward language. That advice is becoming less effective. Cybercriminals now use artificial intelligence to write polished, professional emails in seconds, and the message asking your accounting team to update banking information may no longer be obviously fraudulent.

Attackers can research a company, identify its executives and vendors, learn how employees communicate, and then create messages that look remarkably similar to legitimate business correspondence. In advanced cases, hackers are creating deep-fake videos or audio recordings to impersonate managers.

"Most people still picture a scam email as something obviously fake," said Mike Williams, President at iTech. "But those easy clues are disappearing. Today, a fraudulent message can use your employee's real name, reference an actual vendor, sound like your CEO, and look almost identical to the messages your team receives every day. That's what makes this new generation of attacks so dangerous."

One of the most common forms of email-based fraud is Business Email Compromise, or BEC. The criminal impersonates someone the employee trusts, such as an executive, coworker, customer, or vendor. In the more advanced attacks, the criminal gains access to a legitimate employee's mailbox, studies the existing conversations, learns which vendors the company works with, and waits for the right moment to insert themselves into a real transaction. Since the email comes from someone the employee recognizes, the normal warning signs are not there.

That is why iTech deploys protection in two layers. The first works like an intelligent security checkpoint for email, analyzing the sender, the domain, the links and attachments, and the context around the message, then blocking or quarantining suspicious mail before an employee ever sees it. The second keeps watching for signs that someone has gained access to a Microsoft 365 account: unusual logins, suspicious mailbox activity, unauthorized forwarding rules, and stolen sessions. When activity like that is found, iTech can end the unauthorized sessions, remove the malicious rules, and retract phishing messages that were already sent to other employees.

"The goal is not to make everyone afraid of email," Williams concluded. "It's too valuable of a tool and isn't going anywhere. The goal is to give employees the freedom to do their jobs while leveraging Business Email Compromise technology to protect them. Cybercriminals are using AI, so businesses have to respond with better technology as well."

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Read the full article online: Business Email Compromise Protection for Small Business

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