Astute Technology Management

What is business email compromise? Why should your business care?

Business email compromise of “BEC” is a highly targeted form of attack where criminals impersonate trusted figures, like an executive, vendor, or colleague.

What separates it from other attacks is that it doesn’t exploit your technology; it targets people with messages that seem important and authentic, so they do the hackers' work for them.

Think that sounds ridiculous? In 2019 hackers convinced a Toyota parts supplier to wire $37 million to a fraudulent account. Over 2 years, fraudsters swindled Google and FB out of over $121 million, by posing as Asian-based vendors.

The list goes on and on.

Defending against these attacks requires combining MFA with secondary communication channels, dual authorization for large financial transactions, and specialized security awareness training.

Vigilance is key!

Maximizing business uptime and efficiency must involve both IT and OT management. Here’s why:

Of course, properly maintaining servers, networks, and PCs is important. However, when an IT system goes down, the consequences are significant, but they can often be contained.

Employees may lose productivity, customer calls may get missed, and support tickets may pile up, but unless the downtime is catastrophic, these situations can be recovered.

Contrast that to when a production line halts, a facility loses power, or a safety-critical system fails. In those situations, the consequences extend beyond lost revenue into regulatory liability, equipment damage, and in some industries, direct risk to human safety.

We are talking about this because the stakes are rising as the boundary between IT and OT is disappearing.

As organizations modernize and IT and OT converge, a problem on the IT side can easily impact OT, turning what might be a simple downtime event into something much more serious.

Imagine a ransomware attack cascading directly into your OT systems, or a network misconfiguration that disrupts industrial controllers.

Digitization can bring huge benefits, but keeping a complex digital infrastructure running smoothly requires a holistic view.

You can buy tools, but if your team's ability to learn hasn't kept pace with the technology, then every new application just becomes a waste.

In small businesses, the importance of technology culture gets overlooked, when in fact it’s even more critical than at large organizations.

If even a few people on a 20-person team view a new tool with hostility, it can cause ripples of disruption that negatively impact performance across the entire company.

In the age of cloud, data, and AI, small businesses must balance the reliability of their technology with how quickly they can adopt the latest tools. That’s the key to unlocking maximum productivity.