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Valimail blog

Email Impersonation Knows No Borders

Author: Valimail
Elvis-Impersonation

Hello…Elvis? Photo credit: Gunnshots

Email impersonation scams, also known as business email compromise (BEC) or phishing attacks, have risen 20 percent in the first nine months of this year, according to the Singapore police.

According to the report, those scams have cost Singaporeans S$19 million (U.S. $13.4 million), of which the police have only been able to recover U.S. $100,000 — a recovery rate of just 0.75 percent.

That one case of recovered money provides some insight into how a BEC attack works. On May 27, the news report writes, a Singaporean company received an email from an overseas business partner that included a request for payment. The company transferred the money to a foreign bank account. It was only when they spoke with the overseas partner that the company realized it had fallen victim to a scam, because the partner’s email had been compromised.

Fortunately, the money was still in the bank account, so police were able to recover the funds.

It’s worth noting that the vast majority of email impersonation scams like this don’t require hackers to gain access to the mail servers or mail clients of the target company.

Because most companies don’t utilize email authentication, it’s trivially easy for phishers to send emails to a target (the Singaporean business, in this example) with a fake From: address, making the email look as if it had legitimately originated from another company. Doing so requires no access to the impersonated company’s email systems at all.

That kind of attack can be easily stopped by using DMARC authentication. More than 2.5 billion email inboxes work with standards-based authentication now, including all the major commercial providers of email such as Microsoft, Google, and AOL. If phishers try to impersonate the email address of a company that has implemented DMARC, mailboxes such as these will reject the incoming mail or deliver it to a spam folder — while sending a log of that attempted impersonation to the domain owner.

Is your domain protected by DMARC? Use our free DMARC domain checkerto find out, and request a demo to find out how easy it can be to implement email authentication for your company.

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Published November 17, 2016
  • Cybersecurity
  • DMARC
  • Email
  • Phishing
  • security
Author: Valimail
Valimail is the global leader in zero-trust email security. The company’s full line of cloud-native solutions authenticate sender identity to stop phishing, protect brands, and ensure compliance; they are used by organizations ranging from neighborhood shops to some of the world's largest organizations, including Uber, Splunk, Yelp, Fannie Mae, Mercedes Benz USA, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Valimail is the fastest growing DMARC solution, with the most domains at DMARC enforcement, and is the premier DMARC partner for Microsoft 365 environments. For more information visit www.valimail.com.
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