BEC fraud generated more losses for victims than any other type of cybercrime in 2021. It’s long past time that organizations got a handle on these scams.
The old adage of people being the weakest link in security is especially true when it comes to email threats. Here, cybercriminals can arguable generate their biggest “bang-for-buck” by socially engineering targets into following their instructions. Phishing is the most obvious example of such efforts, and there is one specific type of cybercrime that often leverages targeted phishing messages and has been the highest grossing of any criminal activity over the past few years: business email compromise (BEC).
The latest FBI Internet Crime Report reveals that, once again in 2021, these scams generated more losses for victims than any other type of cybercrime. It’s long past time that organizations got a handle on BEC and developed a layered defensive approach to mitigate the risk of losing large sums of money to faceless fraudsters.
How bad is BEC?
According to the aforementioned report, drawn up by the FBI’s Internet Crime Compliance Center (IC3), the IC3 received 19,954 BEC complaints last year. That actually makes it only the ninth most popular crime type of the year, far behind the leaders phishing (324,000), non-payment/non-delivery (82,000) and personal data breach (52,000). However, off…
