An email arrives from your CEO requesting an urgent, off-schedule wire transfer to secure a vendor deal. Standard operational caution gives way to speed, and cash is redirected to an unauthorized account.
This is the result of a form of cyberattack known as business email compromise. Let’s discuss how to stop it.
The First Thing to Understand: One Form of Protection Isn’t Enough
Is it reasonable to rely solely on employee vigilance to catch a spoofed invoice before six figures leave your bank account?
No, it isn’t, and here’s why:
When a payment request looks authentic and arrives with a directive, even experienced financial staff make human mistakes. Cybercriminals rarely hack into bank accounts using complex code. They simply monitor mailboxes, study communication patterns, and will even go so far as to ask for the money directly.
What kind of information could an attacker pull from your inbox right now?
Protecting your money requires structured safety measures. Protecting an organization’s financial ecosystem is your responsibility to your staff, partners, and clients. By combining email protections with verification protocols, you eliminate single points of failure in your financial workflow and generally strengthen your security resilience.
You Must Establish Out-of-Band Verification Protocols
Technical controls form your first line of defense, but payment procedures require their own physical checks and balances. Out-of-band verification means confirming a transaction through a secondary communication channel completely separate from the one used to make the initial request.
A written, non-negotiable verification process must govern every outgoing transfer.
- Require dual sign-off – Institute a policy where wire transfers over a specific threshold require formal authorization from at least two designated managers.
- Confirm banking details via secondary channels – When a vendor requests a change to their payment instructions, verify it over the phone. Call a trusted number already stored in your system; never the phone number printed on the new invoice or sent in the email.
- Ban executive exceptions – Attackers rely on artificial urgency to bypass standard security checks. That is an unacceptable risk. No emergency should override your validation process.
Do your financial procedures give staff a clear, safe path to pause and verify unexpected payment requests?
Harden Your Technical Environment
Protecting your mailboxes from unauthorized entry or domain spoofing requires proper configuration of modern identity tools and authentication standards. You can do this by:
- Enforce hardware-based multi-factor authentication
- Deploy core email protocols
- Audit inbox rules periodically
Implementing these controls ensures your infrastructure actively protects the business every day.
To review your current email security configuration and payment verification workflows, contact us today at (336) 790-1000.