Analyzes business email compromise (BEC) scams where attackers impersonate executives or vendors to trick employees into transferring funds or sharing sensitive data. Covers detection methods, employee training approaches, and technical controls to prevent BEC attacks.
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A Single Fake Email Cost Facebook and Google $120 Million Between 2013 and 2015, a Lithuanian man named Evaldas Rimasauskas sent a series of fake email messages to employees at Facebook and Google. He impersonated a legitimate hardware vendor, complete with forged invoices and contracts. By the time both companies
In July 2021, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — overwhelmingly powered by spoof techniques — cost victims over $1.8 billion in 2020 alone. That made it the single most financially damaging category of cybercrime they tracked. Not ransomware. Not credential theft. Spoofing-driven impersonation.
In March 2021, Google disclosed that it blocks more than 100 million phishing emails daily — and Gmail remains the single largest target for sophisticated credential theft campaigns worldwide. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported that phishing was the number one crime type by victim count in
In March 2021, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that Business Email Compromise — the sophisticated cousin of fake emails — caused over $1.8 billion in losses during 2020 alone. That made it the costliest category of cybercrime they tracked. Not ransomware. Not credit card fraud. Fake emails
The FakeEmail That Cost One Company $75 Million In 2020, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — attacks built on fakeemail techniques — generated over $1.8 billion in losses in a single year. That made it the costliest category of cybercrime, beating ransomware by
Last month, a finance manager at a mid-sized logistics company received what looked like a routine DocuSign envelope — a payment authorization supposedly routed through PayPal. She clicked, entered her PayPal credentials on a pixel-perfect fake login page, and within 90 minutes, the attacker had initiated $38,000 in wire transfers.
In March 2021, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — often launched using a fake mailer or spoofing tool — cost American organizations over $1.8 billion in 2020 alone. That made it the most financially damaging cybercrime category in the entire IC3 report, dwarfing
One Employee Missed the Red Flags — It Cost $2.3 Million In December 2020, a mid-sized manufacturing company in Ohio wired $2.3 million to what they believed was a long-standing supplier. The invoice looked perfect. The email address was off by a single character. Nobody caught it until the
In 2020, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received 19,369 business email compromise complaints. The adjusted losses? A staggering $1.8 billion — making BEC the single most financially devastating cybercrime category in the FBI IC3 2020 Internet Crime Report. That's more than ransomware, more than
The CEO Who Wired $17 Million to a Criminal In 2016, an executive at Austrian aerospace parts manufacturer FACC received what appeared to be a routine email from the company's CEO. The message instructed a wire transfer of approximately €42 million — roughly $47 million — to accounts controlled by
