Cyber-attacks on business email accounts rise

Attacks targeting business email accounts continued to climb in the second quarter with email compromises accounting for 23 percent of breaches reported to the Beazley Breach Response (BBR) Services team, according to the Q2 Beazley Breach Insight Report.

Reported email compromises grew to 184 in the second quarter from 173 in the first quarter, according to BBR. Business email compromises are efficient for the hacker because the compromise of a single account gives the hacker a platform from which to spear phish within and outside the organization, the report said. They have soared in popularity since the beginning of last year, the report added. In the first quarter of 2017 only 45 cases had been reported.

The email attacks were broadly distributed across industry sectors. Hardest hit were organizations using Office 365, the popular cloud-based productivity solution.

Although potentially very damaging, with costs that can exceed $2 million, attacks of this kind are also relatively easily preventable, the report noted. Two- factor authentication can help, as can employee training. Disabling the ability for third-party applications to access Office 365 can also reduce the likelihood of an attacker using PowerShell, a task automation and configuration management system, for reconnaissance.

“Business email compromise attacks are among the more expensive data breaches we see,” said Katherine Keefe, head of BBR Services. “Years of emails often need to be combed through to identify personally identifiable information or protected health information that has been compromised. In the majority of cases, multiple inboxes are compromised.”

The top two causes of data breaches reported to BBR Services in the second quarter of 2018 were hack or malware attacks (39%) and accidental disclosure (22%). Hack or malware was down 3 percentage points from the first quarter, despite an increase in the number of email compromises. This is due to a slight decrease in the number of reported ransomware incidents in the second quarter.

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