Business Email Compromise (BEC): How Cybercriminals Target Ohio Companies

Business email compromise has become the most financially devastating cyberattack facing organizations today, with the FBI reporting over $50 billion in global losses since 2013. Unlike traditional phishing attacks that cast wide nets hoping for any victim, BEC attacks are precisely targeted operations that exploit specific business relationships, payment processes, and trust hierarchies within organizations. For Ohio businesses in sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services, understanding how these sophisticated scams work is essential for prevention.

The attacks are deceptively simple in execution but devastating in impact. A single successful BEC attack can drain hundreds of thousands of dollars from company accounts in minutes, with little hope of recovery once funds are transferred to overseas accounts. According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, business email compromise consistently ranks among the top cybercrime threats by financial impact, surpassing ransomware, data breaches, and other high-profile attacks.

This comprehensive guide explores how BEC attacks work, the specific tactics criminals use to target Ohio businesses, real-world examples from our region, and most importantly, the practical defenses that can prevent your organization from becoming the next victim. Understanding these threats is the first step toward implementing effective business email security that protects both your finances and your reputation.

Understanding Business Email Compromise Mechanics

BEC attacks succeed through a combination of social engineering, technical deception, and exploitation of normal business processes. Unlike malware-based attacks that security tools can detect, BEC relies primarily on manipulating people rather than systems, making it particularly challenging to prevent through technology alone.

The Anatomy of a BEC Attack

Most BEC attacks follow a predictable pattern, though sophisticated attackers adapt their approaches based on the target organization's specific circumstances. The attack begins with extensive reconnaissance where criminals research your company structure, business relationships, and operational procedures through social media, company websites, press releases, and sometimes previous data breaches.

This intelligence gathering phase can last weeks or months before the actual attack begins. Attackers identify key executives, learn about recent business developments, understand payment processes, and identify times when decision-makers might be unavailable or under pressure to act quickly. The depth of research makes their eventual impersonation attempts remarkably convincing to even suspicious employees.

Once reconnaissance is complete, attackers choose their impersonation target and method. They might register lookalike domains that closely resemble legitimate company domains, compromise actual email accounts through phishing or credential theft, or simply spoof display names to make messages appear to come from trusted sources. The method chosen depends on the target organization's technical defenses and the specific scenario the attacker plans to exploit.

The actual attack typically involves urgent requests that discourage verification through normal channels. Attackers create time pressure, confidentiality requirements, or authority dynamics that make employees hesitant to question the request. By the time victims realize something is wrong, funds have already been transferred and are extremely difficult to recover.

Common BEC Attack Scenarios

CEO fraud represents the most recognized BEC scenario, where attackers impersonate executives to authorize fraudulent wire transfers. These attacks typically target finance staff, exploiting their reluctance to question executive requests and their access to company funds. Attackers often time these requests to coincide with executive travel or known busy periods when verification becomes more difficult.

The messages are carefully crafted to match the executive's communication style, often using information gleaned from previous emails or social media to enhance authenticity. Attackers might reference legitimate projects or business dealings to establish credibility before making the fraudulent request. The combination of apparent authority, urgency, and plausible context makes these attacks remarkably effective even against trained employees.

Vendor email compromise involves attackers compromising supplier or vendor email accounts to redirect payments. Rather than impersonating someone within your organization, criminals gain access to legitimate vendor accounts and send invoices or payment instructions that direct funds to attacker-controlled accounts. These attacks exploit the trust your organization has in established vendor relationships and the routine nature of payment processing.

Detection is particularly challenging because the emails come from legitimate vendor accounts, bypass many security controls designed to catch external impersonation, and often involve amounts and payment terms consistent with normal business operations. Many organizations only discover these compromises when the legitimate vendor inquires about overdue payments weeks or months after the fraudulent transfer.

Attorney impersonation attacks exploit the sensitive nature of legal matters and the confidentiality surrounding them. Attackers pose as lawyers handling acquisitions, litigation, or other legal matters requiring urgent confidential payments. The implied confidentiality discourages verification through normal channels, while the legal context creates pressure to comply quickly to avoid jeopardizing important business matters.

These attacks often target executives or board members directly rather than finance staff, exploiting their generally lower exposure to security training and their authority to authorize payments without extensive internal controls. The combination of legal implications, confidentiality requirements, and executive targeting makes attorney impersonation attacks particularly effective and damaging.

Real-World BEC Examples from Ohio Businesses

Understanding how BEC attacks play out in practice helps organizations recognize warning signs before falling victim. These examples, drawn from actual incidents affecting Ohio businesses, illustrate the sophistication and variety of BEC tactics.

Manufacturing Company Wire Fraud

A Dayton-area manufacturing company with approximately 150 employees fell victim to a CEO fraud attack that resulted in a $380,000 loss. The attack occurred while the CEO was traveling overseas for business development meetings, a detail the attackers knew from LinkedIn posts and company press releases.

The accounting manager received an email appearing to come from the CEO's account requesting an urgent wire transfer to finalize an acquisition opportunity. The message referenced the CEO's current trip and emphasized the time-sensitive nature of the deal. The display name matched the CEO's exactly, though the actual email address used a lookalike domain with a subtle misspelling.

Despite company policies requiring verbal approval for large transfers, the accounting manager proceeded with the wire under pressure from the apparent authority of the request and the stated urgency. The fraud wasn't discovered until the CEO returned and reviewed financial statements three days later. By then, the funds had been transferred through multiple international accounts, making recovery impossible. The incident prompted the company to implement multi-factor authentication and mandatory out-of-band verification for all wire transfers.

Healthcare Provider Vendor Compromise

A Cincinnati healthcare system experienced a vendor compromise that cost $175,000 before detection. The attackers had compromised the email account of a medical supply vendor the healthcare system had worked with for over a decade. Using the legitimate vendor account, criminals sent updated payment instructions directing future invoices to a new account number.

The email appeared completely legitimate, coming from the actual vendor account and referencing recent orders. The instructions cited a change in banking relationships and included realistic details about the vendor's business operations. The healthcare system's accounts payable department updated their records without verification, as the email came from a trusted source through normal communication channels.

The fraud only came to light six weeks later when the legitimate vendor contacted the healthcare system about overdue payments totaling $175,000. Investigation revealed that the vendor's email had been compromised through a phishing attack two months earlier, giving attackers access to monitor communications and identify payment relationships to target. The healthcare system recovered none of the fraudulently transferred funds but implemented new procedures requiring phone verification for any changes to vendor payment information.

Professional Services Attorney Impersonation

A Columbus-based professional services firm nearly lost $250,000 to an attorney impersonation attack targeting the managing partner. The attacker, posing as an attorney from a real law firm, contacted the managing partner directly about a confidential acquisition opportunity requiring immediate escrow payment to secure the deal.

The message displayed impressive knowledge of the firm's business, referenced actual clients and ongoing projects, and created pressure through confidentiality requirements that discouraged the partner from verifying details with other firm members. The attacker had clearly researched the firm extensively, possibly through previous data breach information combined with publicly available business intelligence.

Fortunately, this attack was prevented when the managing partner's assistant, who handles wire transfers, followed company policy requiring verbal verification for all payments. A call to the law firm the attacker claimed to represent revealed no such attorney worked there and no acquisition was in progress. The close call prompted the firm to implement additional security awareness training emphasizing BEC tactics and verification procedures.

Technical Defenses Against Business Email Compromise

While BEC attacks exploit human psychology, technical controls provide critical defensive layers that can block many attacks before they reach potential victims. Comprehensive technical defenses don't eliminate the need for training and process controls but significantly reduce attack success rates.

Email Authentication and Anti-Spoofing Measures

Implementing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication protocols prevents attackers from easily spoofing your domain in emails to employees, customers, and partners. These protocols verify that messages claiming to come from your domain are actually sent from authorized mail servers, blocking a common BEC technique.

DMARC policies can instruct receiving mail servers to quarantine or reject messages failing authentication checks, preventing spoofed messages from reaching inboxes. However, DMARC only protects against exact domain spoofing, not the lookalike domains attackers often use. Comprehensive protection requires multiple technical controls working together.

Advanced email security solutions detect lookalike domains by analyzing visual similarity between domain names, catching attempts to use domains like "harbourtech.com" versus "harbourtech.net" or "harb0urtech.com" with a zero instead of the letter "o". These solutions alert recipients when messages come from visually similar but technically different domains, giving them opportunity to verify legitimacy before acting.

Display name spoofing detection identifies when the display name on an email doesn't match the actual sender address, a technique attackers use to make messages appear to come from executives or trusted contacts. Security solutions can automatically tag these messages or block them entirely depending on your organization's risk tolerance and operational requirements.

Account Compromise Prevention and Detection

Multi-factor authentication provides the strongest defense against account takeover, which enables many BEC attacks. Even when attackers obtain credentials through phishing, data breaches, or password reuse, MFA prevents them from accessing accounts and using them for impersonation attacks. Implementing MFA for all email accounts, particularly executives and finance staff who are primary BEC targets, should be a top priority.

Conditional access policies can require additional authentication when users access email from unusual locations, unfamiliar devices, or exhibit other anomalous behaviors. These adaptive controls balance security with usability by only adding friction when suspicious patterns emerge rather than impacting normal business operations.

Behavioral analytics solutions establish baseline patterns for each user and alert security teams when deviations suggest potential compromise. Unusual login times, access from new locations, changes in email forwarding rules, or atypical sending patterns can all indicate account takeover that might enable BEC attacks. Early detection allows organizations to respond before attackers can exploit compromised accounts.

Proper configuration of Microsoft 365 email security settings provides robust account protection when fully utilized. Many organizations operate with default configurations that don't take advantage of available protections, leaving accounts vulnerable to compromise through preventable attacks.

Automated Warning Systems

External sender warnings automatically tag messages from outside your organization, helping employees maintain appropriate skepticism toward requests from external addresses. While simple, these warnings prove effective at reducing BEC success rates by breaking the automatic trust employees extend to messages in their inbox.

Link and attachment scanning solutions check URLs and files in real-time, blocking access to known malicious sites and quarantining suspicious attachments. These controls catch attacks that use email to deliver credential phishing pages or malware designed to facilitate account compromise. Integration with threat intelligence feeds enables rapid response to emerging threats before they successfully compromise users.

AI-powered anomaly detection analyzes email content, sender relationships, and request patterns to identify potential BEC attempts. These systems learn normal communication patterns between employees and can flag unusual requests even when they come from legitimate accounts. For example, the system might alert when the CFO's account suddenly sends payment instructions to a new vendor or requests wire transfers outside normal approval processes.

Process Controls and Human Defenses

Technical controls alone cannot stop BEC attacks. Effective prevention requires business process changes and trained employees who serve as the critical last line of defense against sophisticated social engineering.

Payment Verification Procedures

Out-of-band verification procedures create human checkpoints that stop most BEC attacks regardless of their sophistication. These procedures require employees to verify unusual payment requests through separate communication channels before executing transactions. The key is making verification convenient enough that employees actually follow the procedures rather than finding workarounds.

Effective verification procedures specify what triggers verification requirements and exactly how verification should be conducted. Rather than vague guidance to "verify unusual requests," procedures should clearly define thresholds like wire transfers over $10,000, changes to vendor payment information, or requests from executives outside normal approval chains. The specific verification method matters too because attackers who have compromised email accounts can intercept verification attempts through the same channel.

Phone verification using known phone numbers provides effective verification for most scenarios. The procedure should specify that employees must use phone numbers from previous verified communications or directory listings rather than contact information provided in the suspicious request itself. This simple requirement prevents attackers from directing verification calls to numbers they control.

For the highest-risk transactions, organizations may require in-person verification or approval from multiple signatories. While more burdensome than phone verification, these additional controls provide appropriate protection for scenarios like international wire transfers over certain thresholds or changes to key vendor relationships.

Authority and Approval Hierarchies

Clear authority hierarchies specify who can approve different types of transactions and what approval process must be followed. These hierarchies should be documented, communicated widely, and enforced through both technical controls and training. Attackers exploit ambiguity about approval authorities to pressure employees into executing fraudulent transactions without proper verification.

Separation of duties ensures that no single person can independently execute high-risk transactions like wire transfers or vendor payment changes. This control requires different individuals to initiate and approve transactions, making BEC attacks more difficult because attackers must successfully compromise multiple people rather than just one. The separation must be real rather than just a procedural checkbox, with technical controls preventing individuals from approving their own requests.

Executive communication about security procedures reinforces their importance and sets expectations that verification procedures apply even to requests from leadership. When executives publicly support verification procedures and submit to them in their own transactions, employees feel empowered to require verification without fear of appearing insubordinate or creating friction in business operations.

Security Awareness Training Specific to BEC

Generic security awareness training rarely prepares employees for sophisticated BEC attacks. Effective training must specifically cover BEC scenarios, tactics, and red flags using examples relevant to employee roles and responsibilities. Finance staff need training focused on payment fraud scenarios, while executive assistants need training on CEO impersonation and confidential deal urgency tactics.

Regular training reinforcement prevents knowledge decay and adapts to evolving attack methods. Annual training sessions fail to maintain awareness necessary to recognize attacks, particularly as criminals develop new social engineering approaches. More effective programs deliver brief training modules quarterly or monthly, keeping security top-of-mind without creating training fatigue.

Phishing simulation programs test employees with realistic but safe BEC scenarios, providing immediate feedback and additional training when someone falls for the simulation. These programs should use scenarios specific to your industry and business model rather than generic templates. Simulations should also gradually increase in sophistication, starting with obvious attacks that teach recognition fundamentals and progressing to subtle scenarios that require careful analysis.

Our comprehensive security awareness training services include BEC-specific modules tailored to your organization's risk profile and business processes. Training effectiveness improves dramatically when scenarios reflect actual attack methods targeting your industry and region rather than generic examples that feel disconnected from daily work.

Incident Response for BEC Attacks

Despite best efforts, some BEC attacks will succeed. Having a tested incident response plan minimizes financial losses and helps preserve evidence for law enforcement and potential civil actions. The plan should define specific steps for different scenarios, assign clear responsibilities, and establish communication protocols.

When a BEC attack is suspected or confirmed, immediate actions include freezing additional transfers, notifying banks to attempt transfer recalls, securing affected accounts, and alerting law enforcement. Time is critical because funds transferred through BEC attacks move quickly through multiple accounts across different countries. Banks may be able to recall transfers if notified within hours, but chances of recovery drop dramatically after 24-48 hours.

Preserving evidence helps law enforcement investigation and potential civil recovery efforts. Organizations should preserve all relevant emails including full headers, document transaction details, and maintain records of normal communication patterns with impersonated parties. While recovery rates for BEC losses remain low, thorough evidence collection improves chances of tracking funds and identifying perpetrators.

Post-incident analysis identifies how the attack succeeded and what controls failed or were bypassed. This analysis drives improvements to prevent similar future attacks, whether through additional technical controls, modified procedures, or enhanced training. Every incident provides learning opportunities that strengthen overall security posture if organizations systematically analyze failures and implement corrective measures.

Industry-Specific BEC Risks and Protections

Different industries face varying BEC risk profiles based on their business models, transaction patterns, and regulatory environments. Understanding industry-specific risks helps organizations prioritize defenses and implement controls addressing their most likely attack scenarios.

Manufacturing and Distribution BEC Risks

Manufacturing and distribution companies face elevated BEC risks due to complex supply chains, international operations, and regular high-value payments to vendors. Attackers exploit the routine nature of supplier payments and the pressure to maintain production schedules that discourage delays for verification.

Vendor relationship complexity creates additional attack surfaces, with manufacturers typically working with dozens or hundreds of suppliers. Attackers who compromise even one supplier account can leverage that access to redirect payments or infiltrate customer networks. The international nature of many supply chains adds challenges around verification due to time zones, language barriers, and varied business practices.

Manufacturing companies should implement robust vendor verification procedures that include confirming any changes to payment information through known phone numbers or secondary email addresses registered during vendor onboarding. Regular verification calls for key suppliers, particularly those involving international payments, help identify compromises before funds are lost. Our manufacturing IT solutions guide covers comprehensive supply chain security practices.

Healthcare BEC Vulnerabilities

Healthcare organizations face unique BEC risks due to their focus on patient care over administrative processes, often distributed decision-making, and complex vendor relationships with medical suppliers and equipment providers. The pressure to maintain care delivery creates situations where payment verification might be viewed as an obstacle to operations.

Medical practices and healthcare systems typically work with numerous vendors for equipment, supplies, pharmaceuticals, and services. Each vendor relationship represents a potential attack vector if the vendor's account is compromised. Healthcare organizations also face insider threat risks from employees with financial pressures who might be recruited to assist in BEC schemes.

Strong payment controls become especially critical in healthcare where compromised funds represent money that could have been used for patient care. Healthcare organizations should implement verification procedures that work within clinical workflows rather than creating compliance burdens that providers route around. Our healthcare IT services guide addresses security controls appropriate for healthcare operational environments.

Financial Services Heightened Exposure

Banks, credit unions, and financial services firms face sophisticated BEC attacks from well-funded criminal organizations and nation-state actors. These organizations are attractive targets because successful attacks can yield much larger sums than typical business victims. Financial institutions also face reputational damage that extends beyond direct financial losses when payment systems are compromised.

The high volume of daily transactions in financial services creates challenges for detecting fraudulent payments among legitimate business. Attackers exploit this complexity by timing attacks during peak periods or targeting accounts with high transaction volumes where fraudulent activity might go unnoticed longer. Sophisticated attackers also study financial institutions' fraud detection systems to structure attacks that stay below monitoring thresholds.

Financial institutions need advanced behavioral analytics specifically tuned to detect BEC patterns among high transaction volumes. These systems should flag deviations from established patterns for business accounts, such as first-time international wires, changes to beneficiary information, or transactions occurring outside normal business hours. Our banking cybersecurity guide covers comprehensive fraud prevention for financial institutions.

Protecting Your Organization from BEC Attacks

Business email compromise represents a serious and growing threat to organizations of all sizes across Ohio. The FBI reports that BEC attacks continue to increase in both frequency and sophistication, with losses averaging over $120,000 per successful attack. For many small and medium-sized businesses, a single successful BEC attack can threaten financial stability and require years to recover from both financially and reputationally.

Protection requires a comprehensive approach combining technical controls, process improvements, and trained employees. No single measure provides complete protection, but organizations that implement layered defenses dramatically reduce their risk of successful attacks. The investment in prevention is minimal compared to potential losses and the operational disruption caused by financial fraud.

Harbour Technology Consulting has helped hundreds of Ohio businesses implement comprehensive BEC prevention programs that balance security with operational efficiency. Our approach starts with assessment of your current vulnerabilities, specific attack scenarios most likely to target your industry and organization size, and existing controls that may need enhancement or replacement.

We provide the technical security controls, process design, and employee training needed for effective BEC prevention. Our team works with your finance, IT, and executive leadership to implement verification procedures that employees will actually follow because they're designed around your specific operational requirements rather than generic best practices that often prove impractical in real business environments.

Don't wait for a successful attack to take BEC threats seriously. The financial and reputational damage from business email compromise can be catastrophic for small and medium-sized businesses. Contact Harbour Technology Consulting at 937-428-9234 or info@harbourtech.net to schedule a BEC risk assessment.

Schedule your free BEC risk assessment or learn more about our comprehensive email security solutions that protect Ohio businesses from sophisticated cyber threats. Protect your organization before attackers strike.