INFOGRAPHIC
INFOGRAPHIC
Mimecast report finds increase
in Business Email Compromise
(BEC) attacks
Mimecast’s latest ESRA
report has revealed that
millions of spam, tens
of thousands of BEC or
impersonation attacks,
dangerous file types and
malware attachments
are being delivered to
users’ inboxes.
M
imecast, a leading email and data
security company, has announced
the availability of its latest Email
Security Risk Assessment (ESRA). The
quarterly assessment is an aggregated
report of tests that measure the efficacy of
widely used email security systems.
This quarter’s ESRA report found a
significant increase in Business Email
Compromise (BEC) attacks, emails
containing dangerous file types, malware
attachments and spam being delivered
to users’ inboxes from incumbent email
security systems.
BEC attacks, also referred to as email-based
impersonation fraud, is an issue that is not
going away because these attacks can
easily evade many traditional email security
systems on a global scale.
The latest ESRA found a 269% increase in
these types of attacks, in comparison to the
same findings in last quarter’s report.
This trend was also reflected in recent
research, the State of Email Security 2019
report, which found that 85% of the
1,025 global respondents experienced an
impersonation attack in 2018, with 73% of
those victims having experienced a direct
business impact – like financial, data or
customer loss.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
The rise in BEC attacks underscores the need
for organisations to add protection against
well-resourced attackers.
BEC attacks are not the only method
cybercriminals have been successfully
leveraging to target organisations. The
ESRA report found 28,783,892 spam emails,
28,808 malware attachments and 28,726
dangerous files types were all missed by
incumbent providers and delivered to users’
inboxes, an overall false negative rate of
11% of inspected emails. The results from
the report demonstrate the need for the
entire industry to continue to work toward a
higher standard of email security.
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