How to Prevent Business Email Compromise Attacks: Protect Your Company from a Growing Threat

What is Business Email Compromise (BEC)?

Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a type of cyberattack where criminals impersonate company executives, vendors, or trusted partners to trick employees into transferring funds or sharing sensitive information.

These attacks often look like normal emails but use social engineering and domain spoofing to bypass suspicion. Once the attacker gains trust, they’ll request wire transfers, send fake invoices, or redirect payroll deposits.

According to the FBI, BEC scams led to over $2.4 billion in reported losses in 2021, and the numbers continue to climb. These aren’t just annoying phishing emails. BEC attacks are well-researched, targeted, and devastating.

Training your team to spot suspicious emails and understand common tactics is one of the best ways to protect your business from financial loss, legal issues, and damage to your reputation.

How Business Email Compromise Works

Business Email Compromise attacks are carefully planned social engineering scams. Threat actors often spend weeks researching your company—digging through LinkedIn, company websites, press releases, and even social media—to understand your org chart, vendor relationships, and financial processes.

Once they have what they need, the attacker creates a convincing email that appears to come from a high-level executive, trusted vendor, or colleague. The message usually asks for a time-sensitive wire transfer or payment, framed as urgent, confidential, and business-critical.

These emails are often free of obvious red flags. The email address might look nearly identical to a real one, or the attacker may have gained access to a real account. Their goal is to make the request feel routine enough that no one second-guesses it.

If successful, the result is usually a wire transfer sent straight into a criminal’s bank account—often overseas—before anyone realizes what happened.

Common Steps in a Business Email Compromise Scam

Here’s how most BEC scams unfold:

1. Research the Target
   Attackers gather public information about your organization’s staff, vendors, and communication habits using LinkedIn, your company website, and social media.

2. Identify Financial Decision-Makers
   Scammers pinpoint employees involved in payments, typically someone in accounting or finance.

3. Craft a Deceptive Email
   Using spoofed or compromised email addresses, they create messages that appear to come from executives, vendors, or known contacts.

4. Create Urgency or Secrecy
   The email may stress that the payment is confidential or time-sensitive, reducing the likelihood of internal verification.

5. Request a Wire Transfer or Payment
   The scammer asks for funds to be sent for a fake invoice, a new vendor setup, or a foreign tax payment.

6. Transfer Is Completed
   If no red flags are noticed, the payment is sent, often to a foreign account that quickly goes dark.

7. Funds Are Gone
   Once the transfer is complete, it’s nearly impossible to recover the money, leaving the business with a loss.

How to Protect Your Business from Business Email Compromise

BEC attacks are tricky to detect — but with the right approach, your business can drastically reduce the risk. These tips combine technical controls with practical employee awareness.

1. Train Employees to Spot Threats

Your first line of defense is your team. Provide regular cybersecurity training that covers:

• Recognizing fake or urgent email requests

• Reviewing their “sent” folder for unauthorized messages

• Using strong, unique passwords with at least 12 characters

• Storing credentials securely using a password manager

• Reporting suspicious emails to IT immediately

2. Set Up Email Authentication

Email spoofing is at the heart of most BEC attacks. We recommend implementing:

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework)

• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)

• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)

These protocols validate emails sent from your domain, reducing your chance of being spoofed — and keeping your messages out of junk folders.

[Need help setting up DMARC or SPF? Contact us.]

3. Build a Secure Payment Approval Process

Put the brakes on fraudulent transfers by requiring:

• Multi-person approval for any new or unusual payments

• Two-factor authentication for finance users

• Verification via a secondary communication channel (never rely on email alone)

4. Monitor Transactions Regularly

Designate someone to review and reconcile financial activity regularly. Spotting a suspicious transaction early may prevent a full-blown breach.

5. Create a BEC Response Plan

Even with precautions, attacks can still happen. Make sure your response plan includes:

• Internal incident reporting procedures

• Steps to freeze or reverse transfers

• Who to notify: leadership, finance, legal, and law enforcement

6. Use Anti-Phishing Technology

Deploy tools that filter out phishing attempts before they hit inboxes. AI-driven email security platforms can block threats that bypass standard filters — and many offer real-time threat detection and reporting.