Business Email Compromise Protection
Prevent targeted attacks on email with advanced email protection
Help prevent email-borne threats with advanced protection
Email is still an essential part of doing business—which means it continues to be a top threat vector for cybercriminals, who use email-borne attacks to steal data, lock users out of their systems, or worse.
Business email compromise (BEC) exploits typically use the identity of a legitimate person or entity to trick their targets and can take many forms. Whether forging a sender address, a sender display name, or masquerading as a legitimate third party like a bank, threat actors often pose as someone else to accomplish their attacks. This can lead to malware installation, and ultimately, a data breach.
Help prevent these attacks on your customers’ networks for inbound and outbound email with advanced threat protection from N‑able™ Mail Assure.
Get email security with advanced security technology
With cyberattacks becoming more sophisticated, it’s important to look for an email solution that offers multiple layers of protection and includes a comprehensive set of security technologies to help identify the legitimacy of senders.
N‑able Mail Assure uses three main methods of sender authentication to help combat phishing and spoofing attempts—Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC). But these email protocols alone are not enough to validate that a sender is truly who they claim to be.
Mail Assure implements several other technologies and methods to help protect email against BEC, like performing in-depth header analysis on inbound messages to look for many telltale signs of phishing. It also looks at the IP address and domain reputation, and performs content and signature checks. In addition, conformance with RFC standards are verified.
Leverage global threat intelligence
Cybercriminals continue to advance in their techniques, constantly changing tactics to strengthen their attacks and scam end users. Providing good email security requires continuously adjusting to stay ahead.
Defend against ever-evolving threats with global, collective threat intelligence. N‑able Mail Assure is a cloud-based email security and continuity solution that uses proprietary filtering technology to incorporate data from over 23 million mailboxes under management.
Mail Assure’s team constantly monitors the threat landscape and has the tools to act on live threats when needed, proactively updating the filters to help ensure maximum email threat detection and minimizing false positives.
The multitenant web interface is designed so users have visibility and control over their email flow, and users have options to release, block, deny, or allow messages. These actions automatically teach Mail Assure’s technologies to adjust its behavior.
Customize filtering rules
Your customers expect you to take care of their security postures. This requires taking a layered approach to security if you want to keep up in today’s ever evolving cyberthreat landscape.
A powerful email security solution should form part of your security layers. This should include making sure you have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured on your customers domains. In addition, you can take even more advanced steps by customizing filtering rules to suit your customers’ business needs and email traffic.
With Mail Assure, administrators and users can easily set up advanced filtering rules to protect users from BEC attacks. For example, advanced filtering rules can help identify messages containing the name of your customers’ CEO in the “From” field of emails that originate from outside the organization, protecting your customer from a phishing attack.
Maintain business productivity with email security and continuity
Cybercriminals often use email as a delivery mechanism for other malicious cyberattacks. All it takes is one click on a malicious link to download ransomware or install spyware onto an endpoint. Strong email security solutions can help prevent attacks on email, but they can also help prevent data loss if a malware attack succeeds.
Mail Assure offers long-term email archiving with an unlimited retention period. It encrypts, compresses, and stores emails to help ensure they are available for backup and compliance purposes. Its cloud-based vault uses robust encryption in transit (using TLS encryption) and at rest (using AES encryption) to help keep data secure and help put your customers’ minds at ease.
24/7 email continuity is included by default to help keep your customers email available in the case of email server downtime. Even if the primary email service suffers an outage, users can continue to receive and send email from the cloud-based interface.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How can I prevent business email compromise?
How can I prevent business email compromise?
A combination of advanced email security technologies and user awareness training is key to combatting BEC.
An email gateway designed with support for email security protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC—intended to help verify the trustworthiness of a sender—can help prevent phishing and spoofing attacks. It’s also important to go beyond sender authentication checks. Email security technologies should analyze email headers, the IP reputation, domain, and email reputation. In addition, solutions that conform to RFC standards and also perform checks on the content and signatures in emails can help verify the legitimacy of emails and senders.
Business email compromise attacks rely on human error. As a result, user awareness training is important. Users need to be taught to remain alert to the signs of phishing emails and avoid clicking potentially malicious links or downloading questionable attachments.
What are examples of business email compromise?
What are examples of business email compromise?
Most bad actors try to trick email users via impersonation. They pretend to be a legitimate person or a company the email user knows. To do this, they use sophisticated techniques to craft email attacks.
Some examples include:
Display name spoofing: A spammer will often fake the display name in an email while leaving the “From” address alone. They do this to try to make the email look and sound like a message from a known sender. This type of spoofing is also known as business email compromise (BEC), whale phishing, or VIP/CEO fraud, and can be quite common.
“From” address spoofing: Many phishers will use a fake “From” address. This works because the address appears in your mail client and can be easy to miss when looking at a message quickly.
Has my email been compromised?
Has my email been compromised?
Some typical signs your email account has been compromised include:
- Being unable to log in with your password
- Receiving unexpected password reset emails
- Finding emails in your sent folder not initiated by you
- Hearing complaints from your contacts that they are receiving strange content from you
- Noticing unusual login activity such as logins from IP addresses or locations where you haven’t been (e.g., you live in the United Kingdom, but you see a login attempt from Croatia)
- Having unfamiliar activity on your account
How do I fix a compromised email account?
How do I fix a compromised email account?
You must act fast to minimize the damage. Take the following steps when you realize your email account has been compromised:
- Change your account password. Industry experts advise using a password management system that can help generate and store complex passwords on your behalf.
- Run your antivirus program to identify and eliminate any forms of malware or spyware.
- Contact your banks and credit agencies to check if any transactions have taken place without your permission
- Check online accounts (i.e. Amazon, Netflix, etc.), and change your passwords for these.
- Let your email contacts know your account has been hacked. Cybercriminals could currently be using your email account to send mass phishing campaigns.
- Update the security questions of your account.
- Report the incident with your email service provider and email security provider. This helps providers track cybercriminal behavior and train their systems to prevent future compromises for your customers and other businesses.
Other Solutions
Prevent targeted email attacks with business email compromise protection
- Help protect against business email compromise with email security built on collective threat intelligence
- Safely store email data with long-term, encrypted email archiving
- Maintain business productivity with 24/7 built-in email continuity