Email can be awful. From all varieties of spam that sneak through your filters to "reply all" conversations that trap you into finding meaningful comments buried 17 layers deep in a message, email is the business scourge that not even a pandemic can erase. And it only gets worse: Email is also a vector for a variety of attacks that can open the door for theft, fraud, ransomware, and more.
According to the FBI, business email compromise (BEC) attacks were responsible for more than $26 billion in global damages between 2016 and 2019. BEC is a broad description, used by some organizations (like the FBI) to cover virtually all attacks that use a trusted email address as part of the campaign. Others, however, use BEC as a more specific term and email account compromise (EAC) to describe a different type of attack.