Email impersonation attacks, such as Business Email Compromise (BEC), are among the most costly and damaging cyber threats to organizations. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), BEC alone accounted for nearly $2.95 billion in reported losses in 2023, making it one of the most financially devastating forms of cybercrime. While BEC is a more specific, high-stakes form of phishing, it shares tactics with other phishing-related attacks, such as email forgery and spoofing.
These kinds of attacks include impersonating high-level executives, manipulating email communications, and gaining access to legitimate business email accounts to deceive victims into transferring funds or revealing sensitive information.
The consequences of a successful email impersonation attack can be devastating, resulting in financial loss, data breaches, and reputational damage.
This article explains how these attacks work and what organizations need to do to help prevent them.
Impersonation Protection: Safeguard Identity and Information
Impersonation attacks rely on attackers setting up email addresses that closely resemble legitimate ones. They may use similar domain names, slightly altered email structures, or even create entirely fake email accounts to deceive employees. These attacks aim to trick employees into clicking on malicious links, granting access to sensitive data, or installing malware or ransomware into a business’s systems.
The goal of these impersonation attacks is not only to gain initial access but also to move laterally through the network, gathering critical business data, compromising operations, and damaging the company’s reputation.
To successfully carry out an impersonation attack, attackers depend on the availability of personal and organizational data. This is where proactive personal data removal becomes essential. By reducing the amount of exposed employee information available online, organizations can make it more difficult for attackers to craft believable impersonation emails. Data removal services like Optery help limit the information attackers can use to impersonate employees or executives, reducing the chance of a successful attack.
Understanding Email Forgery & Spoofing
Email forgery involves the manipulation of email headers, metadata, or sending information to make fraudulent emails appear legitimate. One of the most common forms of forgery is email spoofing, where the attacker fakes the “from” address to make an email appear as if it came from someone within the organization. Spoofing is often used in conjunction with impersonation attacks to build credibility.
Common techniques include:
- Domain spoofing: Using a fake domain name that closely resembles a legitimate one (e.g., replacing a lowercase “L” with an uppercase “I”).
- Display name spoofing: Manipulating the display name so it appears to be a trusted sender while the email address itself is different.
Successful forgery and spoofing often require significant research on the organization and its employees. Attackers typically gather this data from open sources, including social media, data broker sites, and corporate websites. The more information available about an employee or executive, the easier it is for attackers to create convincing forged emails.
Optery’s Role in Preventing Email Forgery and Spoofing
By using a personal data removal service like Optery, organizations can limit the availability of sensitive employee data online. This proactive step reduces the pool of information attackers rely on for research and makes it significantly harder for them to impersonate or spoof key employees. When attackers are unable to find sufficient information to craft convincing emails, their chances of success decrease dramatically, prompting them to seek out other, more data-rich targets.
Phishing vs. Business Email Compromise (BEC)
Phishing attacks, including those that use forgery and spoofing techniques, involve manipulating emails to make them look like they’re from legitimate sources. However, Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a more advanced form of attack where the attacker gains real access to a business email account. In these cases, an attacker may have already stolen the credentials through a phishing attack or hacked the account through other means. Once inside, the attacker uses the compromised email account to send convincing messages without raising suspicion.
BEC attacks require high levels of social engineering sophistication and research. The attacker uses the actual business email account to communicate with employees, vendors, or partners, making the fraudulent emails even more difficult to detect. Because the compromised account belongs to a real employee, the typical red flags—like strange domain names or spoofed email addresses—are not present.
How Personal Data Removal Helps Prevent BEC
Preventing BEC attacks involves stopping the attacker before they gain access to an employee’s email account. One of the critical entry points for BEC is phishing, where attackers leverage publicly available data to craft convincing emails that trick employees into revealing their login credentials. Removing personal data from data broker sites and other public sources makes it much harder for attackers to gather the information they need to craft effective phishing emails in the first place. This reduces the likelihood of attackers ever gaining access to a business email account.
Additionally, exposed contact information found on data broker sites can be entered into breach repository databases, which can return password data, including hashed passwords. These hashes can then be cracked, giving attackers access to the employee’s credentials. By removing personal data from data broker sites, organizations reduce the likelihood of attackers finding this information, thus preventing them from accessing an employee’s email account and launching BEC attacks.
Protecting Employees Against Email-Based Attacks
To protect against impersonation, spoofing, and BEC attacks, organizations need to adopt a proactive approach. Here are several key steps to safeguard employees:
- Remove Publicly Available Employee Data: As mentioned earlier, removing personal data from public sources is a proactive way to reduce the risk of impersonation and phishing attacks. Data removal services like Optery significantly decrease the information attackers can use to research and impersonate employees.
- Implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Requiring MFA across all accounts, especially for high-risk roles, provides an extra layer of security. Even if an attacker manages to steal login credentials, MFA can prevent unauthorized access to sensitive systems.
- Deploy Physical Tokens for High-Risk Roles: For executives and other employees at high risk of being targeted in BEC attacks, using physical MFA tokens such as FIDO or YubiKeys ensures an even higher level of security by requiring a physical key to access the account.
- Use Password Managers: Password managers securely store and generate unique passwords for each account, providing protection against credential stuffing, where attackers try a stolen password across multiple accounts. Additionally, password managers can recognize spoofed domains and prevent employees from entering credentials on fraudulent websites, which helps reduce the risk of credential harvesting and BEC attacks.
- Email Authentication Protocols: Email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC help ensure that email systems can verify whether an email is coming from a legitimate source. This can prevent spoofing attacks and reduce the risk of forged emails reaching employees.
- Provide Employee Cyber Awareness Training: Regular training helps employees recognize the latest phishing techniques, including email spoofing and impersonation attacks. Training should include how to identify suspicious emails and report them for further investigation.
A Proactive Defense Against Email-Based Attacks
Preventing email impersonation attacks, forgery, spoofing, and BEC requires a comprehensive approach. A combination of personal data removal, MFA, physical tokens, password managers, email authentication, and employee training, is essential to reducing the risk of email-based attacks.
Optery’s search technology identifies and removes exposed personal information that attackers use for email-based attacks, including phishing and BEC. By removing this data from the web, organizations can proactively reduce the attack surface and enhance their overall email security. Ready to take the next step? Explore our guide to choosing the right personal data removal software for your company today.