How To Safeguard Against BEC Attacks

Email is how business gets done around the world, making it the perfect target for business email compromise (BEC). With BEC lures that are continually evolving to rely on payloadless attacks, organizations must turn to advanced AI solutions. But with those solutions comes an amazingly complex amount of data to interpret, including a high number of false positives from AI-only solutions, that require continual tuning and human oversight.

This all results in the need for a comprehensive AI-based BEC solution that can identify anomalies and suspicious emails through advanced AI-driven detection capabilities, and leverages threat feeds and email authentication protocols as well as reputation checks and proprietary signatures for efficacy. 

What to Look for in a BEC Protection Solution

When deciding upon a way to safeguard against BEC attacks, organizations should look for a solution that:

• Defends against BEC threats by identifying anomalous activity and building a social graph of user interactions, analyzing risky phrases and semantic intent to determine an email’s purpose.
• Provides comprehensive BEC protection by not relying solely on AI to identify patterns and abnormalities, but instead, requires an approach that combines AI with proven indicators from signatures and threat feeds, ensuring attacks are stopped at the point of detection.
• Delivers insight on what is blocked and why by easily triaging each BEC detection then providing information on not only what policy triggered the detection, but also the risky characteristic that led to the decision to block. 
• Makes policy modeling simple through historical analysis of messages, identifying the impact of a policy change and determining the potential messages that could be caught at each level of sensitivity.

How Mimecast Helps Stop BEC Attacks

Mimecast delivers such a solution for organizations of all sizes that can be particularly effective for small businesses that must operate with limited IT and security resources. With Mimecast, AI is much more than just a last line of defense, but instead becomes an integral part of our customers’ daily operations, protecting systems and people from BEC and other threats like phishing, spear phishing, and ransomware.

Not only do the billions of signals that cross our human risk management platform strengthen our AI detection to continuously identify and block advanced BEC attacks, but our protection goes further with unified detection capabilities that protect against any type of email attack.

Learn more about how Mimecast can help your organization stop business email compromise.

¹ 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report | Verizon

² 2023_IC3Report.pdf