Business email compromise (BEC) /email fraud continues to be a serious pain point for organisations worldwide—and according to the FBI, it has resulted in $12.5B in losses. To help combat the issue, a private group of more than 530 organisations/individuals called the Business Email Compromise List is actively sharing BEC information and expertise to stop its escalation. This week, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) has awarded the list with its annual 2018 JD Falk Award, which recognises a project that helps protect the internet and embodies a spirit of volunteerism and community building.
The Business Email Compromise List is spearheaded by Ronnie Tokazowski a senior malware analyst at Flashpoint, and since 2015 has unified more than 530 companies, law enforcement agencies, and individual contributors. Proofpoint is among those recognised security organisations collaborating on the issue of email fraud.
Proofpoint invests approximately 20% of revenue into R&D, which helped enable the development of accurate and effective advanced email fraud analysis techniques as the threat emerged. According to our threat visibility and research, email fraud attacks increased 36% Q2 2018 vs. Q1 2018, and there are no signs that rate will be slowing down. These socially-engineered phishing email attacks are difficult for legacy security technologies to detect as the messages often don’t include embedded malicious links to bypass these solutions. Our analysis has also uncovered no statistical correlation between the size of an organisation and the frequency with which they are targeted.
For more information on how to stop BEC emails from infiltrating your organisation, please review our Defending Against Email Fraud e-book: https://www.proofpoint.com/us/resources/white-papers/defending-against-email-fraud