Email Impersonation Attacks Protection

Overview

The $12 billion scam

Impersonation attacks — also known as business email compromise — can result in significant financial loss, as attackers try to trick employees into making wire transfers or other transactions by pretending to be the CEO, CFO or even external partners. Mimecast makes it easy to protect your internal users, domains and brand from impersonation.

Challenges

The challenges of fighting impersonation attacks

Not all email‐based attacks use malicious URLs or have malware-laden attachments. In fact, billions of dollars have been lost because of simple emails that impersonate your C‐suite and ask for wire transfers or credibly request that other sensitive data be sent back to the impersonator.

Every organization is a target of these advanced, social engineering-based, email impersonation attacks designed to steal money, intellectual property or other sensitive data.

Solutions

The Mimecast Solution

Mimecast’s impersonation protection services provide granular and customizable controls that allow organizations to identify, prevent, quarantine and tag suspicious emails. Mimecast email security helps you defend against email impersonation attacks that seek to spoof a trusted sender and cause a costly data or monetary leak. Mimecast provides:

01.

Protection against malware-less email attacks seeking to impersonate trusted senders.

02.

Real-time scanning of all inbound emails to detect header anomalies, domain similarity, sender spoofing and suspect email body content.

03.

DMARC reporting and enforcement to tackle direct domain spoofing.

04.

Clearly marked alerts on delivered emails that notify recipients of potential risk.

05.

Centralized policy management and reporting to assist in the early detection of impersonation attack campaigns targeting your organization.

FAQs

What are some examples of email impersonation attacks?

Impersonation attacks can be especially hard to detect because they don’t need to include any malware or malicious URLs. Email security solutions, such as Mimecast’s, must go beyond scanning inbound, outbound and internal email for bad URLs and attachments. Mimecast technology also searches emails for anomalies that suggest criminal intent, and it an email fails a certain combination of its tests, Mimecast can be configured to discard the message, quarantine it or send it on to the recipient with a warning that the message may be an impersonation attack.

How to prevent an impersonation attack?

Impersonation attacks can only be prevented through a combination of comprehensive security technology and controls built into an organization’s business processes. The security technology’s role is to scan emails and web interactions for signs of malicious intent, or that an email didn’t really come from who it says it did. Advanced techniques used by Mimecast include both rules-based and machine learning algorithms alongside multiple detection engines. But since impersonation attacks continue to grow more and more sophisticated, the best protection against attacks like business email compromise is to integrate controls into the organization’s payment processes so that no action can be taken on the approval of only one individual. Such controls dramatically increase the likelihood that the impersonation will be discovered before a mistaken payment is sent to the fraudsters behind it.

Email security & resilience

Get world-class protection, offered with total deployment flexibility, with Mimecast Email Security. Our AI-powered detection blocks the most sophisticated email threats.

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Brand protection

Safeguard your digital brand to protect employees, customers, and partners by identifying and blocking brand impersonation attacks exploiting websites similar to your own.

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