CEO Fraud Phishing

The dangers of CEO fraud phishing.

CEO fraud phishing is an email-based attack where hackers impersonate senior company executives to steal funds or gain access to sensitive business data or login credentials. In 2016, the FBI reported a 1300% increase over an 18-month period in business email compromise attacks of this kind.

CEO fraud typically uses spear-phishing techniques to dupe users into revealing sensitive information or transferring money to a fraudulent account. What is spear phishing? Spear-phishing is a targeted attack where hackers send an email that appears to come from a source the recipient would trust. In the case of CEO fraud phishing, the sender appears to be the company's CEO or another C-suite executive like a chief financial officer.

A CEO fraud phishing email typically asks the recipient to initiate a wire transfer to a vendor that ultimately proves to be fraudulent. CEO fraud phishing attacks often rely on two techniques to perpetrate this fraud: sending an email from a compromised email account of a senior employee, or sending an email impersonating a senior employee with an email address at a fake domain that looks very similar to a legitimate domain.

Mimecast solutions for stopping CEO fraud phishing.

Mimecast Targeted Thread Protection – Impersonation Protect was the first solution for CEO fraud phishing brought to market, and it provides instant and comprehensive protection against these kind of impersonation attack. To identify, block and remediate CEO fraud phishing emails, Mimecast can:

• Scan all inbound email in real-time to detect header anomalies, domain similarity, sender spoofing and suspect content – all indications of potential CEO fraud phishing.
• Provide protection against external domain similarity to prevent attacks where hackers exploit trusted third-party relationships and well-known brands.
• Inspect character sets to detect similarities that may not be visible to a user's eye.
• Enable centralized policy management that simplifies reporting and early detection of CEO fraud phishing attacks.

Learn more about CEO fraud phishing and Mimecast.