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Business email compromise (BEC) refers to all types of email attacks that do not have payloads. Although there are numerous types, there are essentially two main mechanisms through which attackers penetrate organizations utilizing BEC techniques, spoofing and account take-over attacks. In a recent  study , 71% of organizations acknowledged they had seen a business email compromise (BEC) attack during the past year. Forty-three percent of organizations experienced a security incident in the last 12 months, with 35% stating that BEC/phishing attacks account for more than 50% of the incidents. The  FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center  (IC3) reports that BEC scams were the most expensive of cyberattacks in 2020, with 19,369 complaints and adjusted losses of approximately $1.8 billion. Recent BEC attacks include spoofing attacks on Shark Tank Host Barbara Corcoran, who lost  $380,000 ; the Puerto Rican government attacks that amounted to $4 million, and Japanese medi...

Banking and financial services organizations are the targets of a new multi-stage adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attack, Microsoft has revealed. "The attack originated from a compromised trusted vendor and transitioned into a series of AiTM attacks and follow-on BEC activity spanning multiple organizations," the tech giant  disclosed  in a Thursday report. Microsoft, which is tracking the cluster under its emerging moniker  Storm-1167 , called out the group's use of indirect proxy to pull off the attack. This enabled the attackers to flexibly tailor the phishing pages to their targets and carry out session cookie theft, underscoring the continued sophistication of AitM attacks. The modus operandi is unlike other AitM campaigns where the decoy pages act as a  reverse proxy  to harvest credentials and time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs) entered by the victims. "The attacker presented targets with a website th...

An ever-evolving and rampant form of cybercrime that targets emails as the potential medium to conduct fraud is known as Business Email Compromise. Targeting commercial, government as well as non-profit organizations, BEC can lead to huge amounts of data loss, security breach, and compromised financial assets. It is a common misconception that cybercriminals usually lay their focus on MNCs and enterprise-level organizations. SMEs these days are just as much a target to email fraud as the larger industry players. How Can BEC Affect Organizations?  Examples of BEC include sophisticated social engineering attacks like phishing, CEO fraud, fake invoices, and email spoofing, to name a few. It can also be termed an impersonation attack wherein an attacker aims to defraud a company by posing people in authoritarian positions. Impersonating people like the CFO or CEO, a business partner, or anyone you will blindly place your trust in is what drives these attacks' success. February of...

Breaking News — The Nigerian prince and his allies who might have also asked you over an email for your assistance to help save "the first African astronaut lost in space" have finally been arrested by the FBI. Don't take it too seriously, as there's no Nigerian prince or an astronaut seeking your help. Instead, it was an infamous 'Nigerian 419' scam email template where fraudsters try to dupe you into making a quick online payment by offering a share in a large sum of money on the condition you help them transfer money out of their country. The FBI today announced the arrests of 281 suspects from around the world as part of an internationally coordinated law enforcement operation aimed at disrupting multi-billion-dollar BEC email and wire transfer scams. With no surprise, the largest number of arrests were made in Nigeria where authorities detained a total of 167 suspects, though a significant number of arrests were also made in nine other countrie...

In a recent highly targeted BEC attack, hackers managed to trick three British private equity firms into wire-transferring a total of $1.3 million to the bank accounts fraudsters have access to — while the victimized executives thought they closed an investment deal with some startups. According to the cybersecurity firm Check Point, who shared its latest investigation with The Hacker News, nearly $700,000 of the total wire transferred amount has permanently lost to the attackers, with the rest of the amount recovered after researchers alerted the targeted firms in time. Dubbed ' The Florentine Banker ,' the sophisticated cybercrime gang behind this attack, "seems to have honed their techniques over multiple attacks, from at least several years of activity and has proven to be a resourceful adversary, quickly adapting new situations," the researchers said. 'The techniques they use, especially the lookalike domains technique, present a severe threat — not ...

The United States Department of Justice announced Monday the arrest of 74 email fraudsters across three continents in a global crackdown on a large-scale business email compromise (BEC) scheme. The arrest was the result of a six-month-long operation dubbed " Operation Wire Wire " that involved the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Treasury, and the US Postal Inspection Service. The international law enforcement authorities led by the FBI arrested 42 of the total 74 individuals involved in BEC scheme in the United States, 29 in Nigeria and 3 each in Canada, Mauritius, and Poland. "Foreign citizens perpetrate many BEC scams. Those individuals are often members of transnational criminal organizations, which originated in Nigeria but have spread throughout the world," the DoJ says. Moreover, the authorities seized nearly $2.4 million and recovered about $14 million in fraudulent transfers, according to the FBI, which estima...

A coordinated law enforcement operation has resulted in the arrest of 11 members allegedly belonging to a Nigerian cybercrime gang notorious for perpetrating business email compromise (BEC) attacks targeting more than 50,000 victims in recent years. The disruption of the BEC network is the result of a ten-day investigation dubbed  Operation Falcon II  undertaken by the Interpol along with participation from the Nigeria Police Force's Cybercrime Police Unit in December 2021. Cybersecurity firms  Group-IB  and Palo Alto Networks'  Unit 42 , both of which shared information on the threat actors and their infrastructure, said six of the 11 suspects are believed to be a part of a prolific group of Nigerian cyber actors known as SilverTerrier (aka TMT). BEC attacks, which began to gain dominance in 2013, are  sophisticated scams  that target legitimate business email accounts through social engineering schemes to infiltrate corporate networks and subseq...

A 46-year-old man in the U.S. has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after being found guilty of laundering over $9.5 million accrued by carrying out cyber-enabled financial fraud. Elvis Eghosa Ogiekpolor of Norcross, Georgia, operated a money laundering network that opened at least 50 business bank accounts for illicitly receiving funds from unsuspecting individuals and businesses after falling victim to romance frauds and business email compromise ( BEC ) scams. Ogiekpolor was charged by a federal grand jury in February 2022 with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and 15 counts of substantive money laundering. The scheme was operational from October 2018 to August 2020. According to the U.S. Justice Department (DoJ), Ogiekpolor enlisted the help of eight "money mules" to open the phony bank accounts under the names of non-existent companies, which were subsequently used to stash the proceeds from their criminal activities. These included creating fic...

INTERPOL said it devised a "global stop-payment mechanism" that helped facilitate the largest-ever recovery of funds defrauded in a business email compromise ( BEC ) scam.  The development comes after an unnamed commodity firm based in Singapore fell victim to a BEC scam in mid-July 2024. It refers to a type of cybercrime where a malicious actor poses as a trusted figure and uses email to trick targets into sending money or divulging confidential company information. Such attacks can take place in myriad ways, including gaining unauthorized access to a finance employee or a law firm's email account to send fake invoices or impersonating a third-party vendor to email a phony bill. "On 15 July, the firm had received an email from a supplier requesting that a pending payment be sent to a new bank account based in Timor-Leste," INTERPOL said in a press statement. "The email, however, came from a fraudulent account spelled slightly different to the supplier...

Microsoft has warned of a multi‑stage adversary‑in‑the‑middle ( AitM ) phishing and business email compromise (BEC) campaign targeting multiple organizations in the energy sector. "The campaign abused SharePoint file‑sharing services to deliver phishing payloads and relied on inbox rule creation to maintain persistence and evade user awareness," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said . "The attack transitioned into a series of AitM attacks and follow-on BEC activity spanning multiple organizations." As part of post-exploitation activity following initial compromise, the unknown attackers have been found to leverage trusted internal identities from the victim to carry out large‑scale intra‑organizational and external phishing in an effort to cast a wide net and widen the scope of the campaign. The starting point of the attack is a phishing email likely sent from an email address belonging to a trusted organization, which was compromised beforehand. A...

Senior executives working in U.S.-based organizations are being targeted by a new phishing campaign that leverages a popular adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing toolkit named  EvilProxy  to conduct credential harvesting and account takeover attacks. Menlo Security said the activity started in July 2023, primarily singling out banking and financial services, insurance, property management and real estate, and manufacturing sectors. "The threat actors leveraged an open redirection vulnerability on the job search platform 'indeed.com,'redirecting victims to malicious phishing pages impersonating Microsoft," security researcher Ravisankar Ramprasad  said  in a report published last week. EvilProxy , first documented by Resecurity in September 2022, functions as a reverse proxy that's set up between the target and a legitimate login page to intercept credentials, two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, and session cookies to hijack accounts of interest. The th...

U.S. and Dutch law enforcement agencies have announced that they have dismantled 39 domains and their associated servers as part of efforts to disrupt a network of online marketplaces originating from Pakistan. The action, which took place on January 29, 2025, has been codenamed Operation Heart Blocker. The vast array of sites in question peddled phishing toolkits and fraud-enabling tools and was operated by a group known as Saim Raza since at least 2020, which is also known as HeartSender. These offerings were then used by transnational organized crime groups to target several victims in the United States as part of various business email compromise ( BEC ) schemes, leading to losses totaling over $3 million. "The Saim Raza-run websites operated as marketplaces that advertised and facilitated the sale of tools such as phishing kits, scam pages, and email extractors, often used to build and maintain fraud operations," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "N...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has sentenced a 31-year-old man to 10 years in prison for laundering more than $4.5 million through business email compromise ( BEC ) schemes and romance scams. Malachi Mullings, 31, of Sandy Springs, Georgia pleaded guilty to the money laundering offenses in January 2023. According to court documents, Mullings is said to have opened 20 bank accounts in the name of a non-existent company named The Mullings Group LLC., which served as a conduit to launder the fraudulent proceeds from at least 2019 to July 2021. The scheme netted millions of dollars via BEC attacks targeting a healthcare benefit program, private companies, and other entities, as well as romance fraud schemes targeting the elderly. A BEC scam is a form of targeted cyber attack in which financially motivated bad actors trick unsuspecting executives and employees into sending money or sensitive data to accounts under their control using various social engineering ploys. Such atta...

Three Nigerian citizens suspected of being members of an organized cybercrime group behind distributing malware, carrying out phishing campaigns, and extensive Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams have been arrested in the city of Lagos, Interpol reported yesterday. The investigation, dubbed " Operation Falcon ," was jointly undertaken by the international police organization along with Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Group-IB and the Nigeria Police Force, the principal law enforcement agency in the country. About 50,000 targeted victims of the criminal schemes have been identified so far, as the probe continues to track down other suspected gang members and the monetization methods employed by the group. Group-IB's participation in the year-long operation came as part of Interpol's Project Gateway, which provides a framework for agreements with selected private sector partners and receives threat intel directly. "The suspects are alleged to have develo...

Cybercriminals are busy innovators, adapting their weapons and attack strategies, and ruthlessly roaming the web in search of their next big score. Every manner of sensitive information, such as confidential employee records, customers' financial data, protected medical documents, and government files, are all subject to their relentless threats to cybersecurity . Solutions span a broad spectrum, from training email users to ensuring a VPN kill switch is in place, to adding extensive advanced layers of network protection. To successfully guard against severe threats from hackers, worm viruses to malware, such as botnet attacks, network managers need to use all tools and methods that fit well into a comprehensive cyber defense strategy. Of all the menaces mentioned above to a website owner's peace of mind, botnets arguably present the most unsettling form of security risk. They're not the mere achievements of malicious amateur cybercriminals. They're state...