Business Email Compromise (BEC) emails, also known as “whaling’ or “CEO fraud”, are highly targeted emails sent to recipients by scammers masquerading as senior executives. These emails leverage social engineering and urgent requests to get employees to carry out large wire transfers or send over sensitive information such as W2 forms.
There has been an explosion in these attacks, with a 1,300% increase since 2015 that has resulted in more than $3 billion in losses for organizations around the world. These threats are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, as scammers are now engaging recipients with multiple email exchanges to gradually build trust, instead of asking for wire transfers or sensitive data in the initial scam emails.
Symantec is continually working with customers to help address these scams and this week we’re happy to announce the introduction of Business Email Scam Analyzer to help give Symantec Email Security.Cloud customers increased visibility into business email scams such as business email compromise.
The Business Email Scam Analyzer is a backend component of the Email Security.Cloud Anti-Spam service that has existed for months, developed as a response to Business Email Compromise. Customers do not need to configure any settings to start benefiting from the new visibility of this detection method.
At this point the Anti-Spam service provides visibility to customers by reporting on an additional spam detection method called “Business Email Scam Analyzer”. The data can be reviewed in both the Dashboard and as part of the Anti-Spam-related Summary and Detailed reports.
Read the support article to learn more about this new capability, including how to run an Anti-Spam report. For more information about Business Email Compromise attacks, please see our blogs:
New BEC scams seek to build trust first, request wire transfer later
Billion-dollar scams: The numbers behind BEC fraud
Business Email Compromise – How to Protect your Organization