BEC scams are difficult to track because they don’t use malware or malicious URLs that can be detected using standard cybersecurity tools. Instead, they rely heavily on advanced phishing, social engineering, impersonation techniques, and the human element to trick email recipients. Here are the basic steps attackers can take to carry out a BEC attack:
1. Research and Targeting
To run a successful BEC scam, hackers lagrowthmachine linkedin scraping tool begin with detailed research on the target business and its employees. They extract employee contact information and company details from websites, social media platforms, and other public forums. Most BEC attacks typically target senior executives, such as CEOs, lawyers, or finance department employees responsible for making payments on behalf of the company.
2. Attack Setup
After finalizing the list of target a tale of lost time email accounts, hackers use the information gathered to spoof email addresses, create lookalike domains, or hack a business’s email system (using phishing techniques). The key to executing successful BEC attacks is impersonating stakeholders that email recipients trust or gaining access to the email accounts of high-level executives, such as CEOs or colleagues, whom the victim trusts to send emails.
3. Send Email
Finally, attackers impersonating business sale lead coworkers, corporate attorneys, or partners send familiar, convincing, and urgent emails to unsuspecting employees. These types of emails trick victims into providing confidential information or initiating illicit payment transfers. It’s important to note that these types of attacks can be conducted as a single email or a series of messages, depending on the level of investigation.
4. Impact on Business
Once the hackers gain the trust of the email recipient, they can easily convince victims to comply with their requests to share confidential data or make payments. For example, attackers can impersonate company partners to receive monthly bill payment transfers to a new account. In such a scenario, targeted finance department personnel may not question the request and simply process the invoice by transferring the required amount.
Why Is Business Email Compromise (BEC) a Problem for Businesses?
Powered by social engineering techniques, BEC attacks are easy to execute, require minimal tools, and are extremely popular with hackers.
BEC scams are sophisticate attacks that typically rely on phishing and social engineering techniques to gain the trust of victims. Since most traditional security measures focus primarily on technical threats, it is difficult for businesses to combat BEC attacks. There are also different types of BEC attacks that target different users across the company, making the problem even more difficult.