Business Email Compromise (BEC) Impersonation: The Weapon of Choice of Cybercriminals

VIPRE Security Group’s Q3 2024 Email Threat Trends Report (press release) highlights that among 1.8B emails scanned (208M malicious), BEC dominated phishing (58%) with 89% impersonation of executives/IT and a rising focus on manufacturing; threat actors favored URL redirection (52%) and shifted malspam toward attachment-based delivery (64%) using LNK/ZIP/DOCX, with 2.18M harmful attachments detected, while RedLine remained the top malspam family—underscoring the need for stronger defenses and user awareness.