Business Email Compromise (BEC) is one of the most financially harmful cyberattacks. BEC is an attack where a cybercriminal uses social engineering techniques or phishing to gain access to an email account with a view to tricking people into disclosing sensitive and valuable data that can be sold or used in other types of attacks or scams. The goal of many BEC attacks is to trick senior executives, budget holders, or payroll staff into making fraudulent wire transfers, changing account details for upcoming payments, or altering direct deposit information to payroll payments directed to attacker-controlled accounts. When the attack results in a fraudulent wire transfer it is often referred to as Funds Transfer Fraud (FTF).

For the past several years, the biggest cause of losses to cybercrime – based on complaints filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) – was BEC attacks. In 2022, IC3 received reports of losses of $2.7 billion from BEC attacks and $2.9 billion in losses in 2023. A recent report from the cyber insurance provider, Coalition, explored the reasons why claims were made on policies and by far the biggest cause of claims was fraud from attacks that originated in inboxes. More than half of claims were for losses that started with emails, with 28% of claims made for BEC attacks and 28% for FTF. The number of claims related to email-based attacks makes it clear that email security is an important aspect of cyber risk management. If you want to reduce cyber risk, email security is one of the best places to start and this is an area where TitanHQ can help.

TitanHQ’s anti spam software, SpamTitan, is an advanced email security solution for businesses and managed service providers that protects against the full range of email-based attacks by blocking spam, phishing, spoofing, malware, and zero-day attacks. SpamTitan includes dual antivirus engines for detecting known malware threats, sandboxing for behavioral analysis of emails to detect zero-day threats, reputation checks, and AI algorithms to anticipate new attacks. SpamTitan is delivered as a cloud-based anti-spam service or an anti-spam gateway, and is one of the most popular MSP spam filtering solutions.

PhishTitan is a relatively new addition to the TitanHQ cybersecurity portfolio and has been developed to improve Microsoft 365 security and catch the sophisticated phishing and BEC threats that Microsoft 365 misses. PhishTitan augments EOP and Defender and detects phishing threats with unbeatable accuracy and minimal false positives, with the solution adapting to new phishing tactics through comprehensive phishing feeds curated by TitanHQ and feedback from end users. PhishTitan rewrites URLs to show their true destination, provides time-of-click protection against URLs in phishing emails, protects against malware, adds banner notifications to emails to warn end users, makes post-delivery remediation quick and easy, and provides next-generation protection against phishing and BEC attacks.

In addition to solutions that block spam and phishing emails, end user security awareness training is important. Email-based attacks target employees and use social engineering to trick them into disclosing sensitive information, downloading malware, and making fraudulent wire transfers. SafeTitan from TitanHQ is a comprehensive security awareness training and phishing simulation platform for training the workforce to be more security aware, showing employees how to recognize and avoid threats, and keeping them up to date on the latest tactics targeting them. The platform also includes a phishing simulator for conducting fully automated phishing simulations. SafeTitan is the only behavior-driven security awareness solution that delivers security training in real-time in response to errors, ensuring training is delivered when it will have the most impact.

Email will continue to be a major attack vector but with TitanHQ solutions in place, you will be well protected. Give the TitanHQ team a call today for more information about these and other TitanHQ security products. All three of these products are available on a free trial to allow you to test them out for yourself and see the difference they make.