Is Your SOC Ready for Business Email Compromise?
▼ Summary
– BEC scams are difficult to detect because they often lack malicious code and rely on simple social engineering tactics.
– Manual investigation of BEC scams is time-consuming and requires checking metadata, origin, and behavioral logs.
– The complexity of BEC investigations strains SOC resources, making it hard to scale manual detection efforts.
– AI is increasingly used by attackers to create sophisticated BEC scams, accounting for 40% of such attacks.
– AI-driven SOC tools can automate and accelerate BEC investigations, enabling detection at scale and freeing up human analysts.
Business email compromise presents a unique security challenge precisely because it operates through psychological manipulation rather than technical exploits. These sophisticated scams bypass traditional security measures by appearing as legitimate communications from trusted sources, making them exceptionally difficult to identify through conventional means. Security operations centers often struggle to keep pace with these threats due to the intensive manual investigation required.
The deceptive simplicity of BEC attacks reveals significant limitations in manual security workflows. When an email contains nothing more than a brief request for payment, determining whether it’s legitimate demands far more than scanning for obvious red flags. This investigative process consumes precious time that most security teams simply don’t possess.
Understanding the full scope of work involved in identifying and neutralizing BEC scams makes a compelling case for artificial intelligence in security operations. Organizations seeking to combat these threats effectively need AI-powered investigation tools integrated into their defense strategies.
Why BEC Evades Detection
Social engineering tactics like phishing and business email compromise frequently escape notice because they typically lack detectable malware. Without malicious code or technical indicators, these emails don’t trigger standard security alerts or reveal themselves during sandbox analysis.
Catching a BEC scam demands sophisticated investigative techniques and specialized expertise. If employees cannot immediately recognize these carefully crafted messages—and many cannot, thanks to increasingly convincing AI-generated content—the security team must undertake detailed forensic work.
Managing all components of a thorough BEC investigation represents a substantial challenge for any security operations team. Only well-resourced, experienced teams can typically complete the necessary steps while maintaining their regular security responsibilities.
This is where artificial intelligence transforms the equation. AI-powered security operations provide the capability to identify BEC scams at scale, offering a solution that manual processes cannot match.
The Real-World Investigation Process
Identifying and stopping an active BEC attack involves multiple complex steps. Consider the time investment, resource requirements, and opportunity costs of diverting attention from other security priorities throughout this process.
The Initial Alert: Security teams typically learn about potential BEC activity when employees report suspicious messages. These might include context-free communications like “Are you available?” or payment requests that violate established company procedures.
Crucially, traditional security tools often miss these threats because they contain no malicious code or obvious harmful behaviors. Newer AI-driven email security platforms are beginning to incorporate contextual and semantic analysis to address this gap.
Preserving Metadata: Security analysts cannot depend on forwarded emails, as this process typically strips crucial metadata. Important information includes encoding schemes, MIME boundaries, X-Headers that reveal sending structure, and authentication results from DMARC, SPF, and DKIM protocols.
To prevent losing these vital data points, investigators must access suspicious emails directly from user inboxes using eDiscovery tools, ensuring message artifacts remain complete and unaltered.
Tracing Origins: Analysts must determine the true source of suspicious emails by examining geographical patterns, sending times, and device information. They check for spoofed domains that might evade human detection but get caught by DMARC authentication, along with lookalike domains using character substitutions or typosquatting techniques.
Behavioral Analysis: Security teams then consult various logs for signs of unusual activity. They sift through SIEM data, audit trails, and access logs from identity management platforms. This time-consuming process is essential for confirming malicious activities that typically follow BEC breaches, including modified inbox rules, exported mailbox data, or unauthorized third-party access grants.
Process Verification: The investigation continues by determining whether the email request aligns with established business workflows or attempts to circumvent standard procedures. For example, was an employee asked to pay a new vendor that accounts payable hadn’t properly vetted?
Overwhelming Manual Investigation Demands
Detailing the BEC investigation process underscores its complexity and resource intensity. The work proves tedious, time-consuming, and requires specialized understanding of both business email compromise tactics and threat detection methodologies.
Many organizations—whether startups, newly digital businesses, or small companies—lack these specialized skills. Even large enterprises often hesitate to dedicate substantial resources every time a suspicious email appears.
Even if organizations could repeatedly perform these investigations, the resource allocation would prove counterproductive, diverting attention from numerous other security responsibilities.
The solution for companies across all security maturity levels lies in artificial intelligence. AI-powered security operations enable organizations to combat business email compromise at scale without overwhelming human analysts.
Integrating AI into Security Operations
The current challenge of keeping pace with malicious emails stems partly from threat actors using AI to generate sophisticated, well-researched BEC and phishing campaigns at unprecedented rates.
Artificial intelligence now contributes to approximately 40% of BEC scams, meaning attackers launch these campaigns more frequently and effectively than ever before. Security teams relying solely on manual investigation techniques struggle to maintain adequate response times.
With AI-enhanced security operations, the investigative methodology remains fundamentally sound, but artificial intelligence executes these processes at remarkable speeds. AI systems consult appropriate tools and orchestrate workflows to gather and analyze data with superior efficiency.
The right AI security platform can fully manage Tier 1 and Tier 2 investigative measures, providing human analysts with significant head starts in their examinations. This partnership allows security teams to handle the overwhelming volume of BEC emails that would otherwise exceed human capacity.
This technological approach empowers businesses to effectively combat business email compromise across their entire organization, transforming what was once an overwhelming challenge into a manageable security operation.
(Source: ITWire Australia)
