Business Email Compromise (BEC) remains one of the most costly and concerning threats to organisations around the world. While other cyber threats such as ransomware or data breaches dominate headlines, BEC continues to quietly cause immense financial and reputational damage, often without setting off a single malware alert.
An Evolving Attack Method
In 2025, BEC has evolved into a multifaceted and highly targeted attack method. At its core, BEC is about deception. It manipulates human trust to gain access to sensitive information, redirect payments, or extract credentials. But the tactics used today are far more sophisticated than in years past, making traditional defences increasingly ineffective.
What makes BEC so dangerous is its lack of obvious indicators. Unlike phishing emails loaded with suspicious links or malware-laden attachments, BEC messages are typically clean. They don’t carry code, and they don’t always rely on spoofed domains. Instead, they use carefully researched social engineering, often targeting finance teams, executives, or anyone authorised to approve payments.
Attackers may spend weeks studying an organisation’s internal structure. They monitor social media, scan corporate websites, and even scrape press releases to understand reporting lines and key personnel. Once they have enough intelligence, they strike, impersonating a trusted executive or supplier, and requesting a wire transfer or confidential data.
In many cases, these emails use look-alike domains or compromised legitimate accounts. For example, a BEC attacker may register a domain with a single letter changed, swapping a lowercase ‘l’ for a capital ‘I’ or a '1', to mimic a vendor or internal staff member. In other cases, they hijack a supplier’s actual email account using previously stolen credentials, making the message indistinguishable from the real thing.
What’s particularly concerning in 2025 is the use of generative AI to craft convincing BEC emails. Attackers are now using AI to analyse tone, phrasing, and communication habits from previous email threads. This means messages are no longer generic, they sound exactly like the people they are impersonating.
The financial impact of BEC can be severe. Businesses have reported multi-million-dollar losses as a result of fraudulent transfers. But the consequences go beyond the balance sheet. BEC attacks damage supplier relationships, erode customer trust, and create internal strain as teams scramble to respond and recover.
These attacks are also increasingly coordinated. Instead of one-off incidents, many BEC operations are part of organised campaigns targeting multiple businesses simultaneously. Attackers frequently rotate targets and refresh tactics, making it difficult for businesses to identify patterns or predict future strikes.
One of the emerging trends is the combination of BEC with credential phishing. Attackers first trick employees into entering login details into fake portals. Once they gain access to a legitimate account, they use it to send internal BEC emails, complete with familiar signatures and existing email threads. This dramatically increases the likelihood of success, as recipients are conditioned to trust what appears to be internal correspondence.
Legal and Regulatory Repercussions
The legal and regulatory implications are also increasing. As regulators demand stricter due diligence around financial controls and data protection, your client's businesses face significant liability if found negligent in preventing or responding to BEC attacks. This includes obligations under financial services regulations, privacy laws, and data breach disclosure rules.
For Managed Service Providers and IT partners, BEC presents a clear opportunity to lead with proactive, risk-based advisory. The first step is raising awareness. Many executives still mistakenly believe that cybersecurity means blocking viruses or encrypting data. But BEC bypasses these controls, targeting the human layer instead.
Partners can help businesses review financial workflows, implement multi-factor authentication and password management tools, and introduce verification protocols for high-risk transactions. Most importantly, they can reinforce the need for advanced email threat detection that goes beyond the basic protections bundled with cloud email platforms.
BEC is not a threat that can be solved with a single tool or policy. It requires an ongoing, layered approach that combines technology, education, and executive buy-in. Businesses that have already suffered a BEC incident often adopt these measures reactively. The opportunity for partners is to help your clients take action before that point.
The risk landscape in 2025 is more complex than ever. Cybercriminals are working smarter, faster, and with more resources. The good news is that partners who understand the real nature of threats like BEC, and can clearly explain the business impact, are well positioned to build trust and deliver meaningful value.
Keeping Businesses Safe and Secure
Prevention is always better than a cure, and one of the best defences is to encourage businesses to proactively boost their company’s cyber resilience levels to avoid threats landing in inboxes in the first place. The fact that a staggering 94% of malware attacks are delivered by email, makes email an extremely important vector for businesses to fortify.
No one vendor can stop all email threats, so it’s crucial to remind customers that if they are using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, they should also have a third-party email security specialist in place to mitigate their risk. For example, using a specialist AI-powered email threat detection solution like MailGuard.
For a few dollars per staff member per month, businesses are protected by MailGuard's specialist, zero zero-day email security. Special Ops for when speed matters! Our real-time zero zero-day, email threat detection amplifies your client’s intelligence, knowledge, security and defence.
MailGuard provides a range of solutions to keep businesses safe, from email filtering to email continuity and archiving solutions. Speak to your clients today to ensure they’re prepared and get in touch with our team to discuss fortifying your client’s cyber resilience.
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