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 Email Cost This Company $47 Million In 2015, Ubiquiti Networks disclosed that threat actors impersonating company executives tricked employees into wiring $46.7 million to overseas accounts. The attackers never breached a firewall. They never deployed malware. They sent emails — and those emails were enough. That's
The FakeEmail That Cost One Company $37 Million In 2024, the FBI's IC3 reported that business email compromise — the art of sending a convincing fakeemail that impersonates a trusted sender — accounted for over $2.9 billion in adjusted losses. That's not a typo. One European company
A Single Email Cost This Company $47 Million In 2015, Ubiquiti Networks disclosed that threat actors impersonating senior executives tricked finance employees into wiring $46.7 million to overseas accounts controlled by attackers. No malware. No zero-day exploit. Just a convincing email that looked like it came from the CEO.
In 2024, a finance executive at a multinational firm wired $25 million to threat actors after a deepfake video call impersonated the company's CFO. That wasn't a Hollywood script — it happened in Hong Kong, and it started with a single phishing email. Executive phishing attacks have
A Single Email Cost This Company $47 Million In 2016, Austrian aerospace manufacturer FACC fired its CEO after a whaling attack tricked an employee into wiring €42 million to a threat actor's account. The attacker impersonated the CEO via email, requested an urgent fund transfer for a fake
Two Trusted Brands, One Devastating Scam In late 2024, security researchers at Avanan documented a surge in phishing campaigns that combined PayPal and DocuSign branding in a single attack chain. The attackers sent emails that appeared to come from DocuSign, notifying the recipient of a payment document waiting for their
The CEO Who Wired $47 Million to a Stranger In 2016, FACC, an Austrian aerospace parts manufacturer, lost €42 million (roughly $47 million) after a threat actor impersonated the company's CEO via email and instructed an employee to wire funds for a fake acquisition project. The CEO and
A Single FakeEmail Cost This Company $37 Million In 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — attacks built on fakeemail messages that impersonate trusted senders — generated over $2.9 billion in adjusted losses. That made BEC the costliest cybercrime category for the fourth
In 2019, a Lithuanian man named Evaldas Rimasauskas pleaded guilty to stealing over $100 million from Google and Facebook — using nothing more than a series of fake email messages. He impersonated a legitimate hardware vendor, sent invoices from spoofed email addresses, and two of the most sophisticated tech companies on
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — a category built almost entirely on the fake email — cost victims over $2.9 billion. That wasn't from sophisticated zero-day exploits. It was from emails that looked real but weren't. I&
