• by Jess Nelson , April 8, 2016

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a warning this week about a dramatic increase in CEO email scams. Business e-mail compromise scams have increased 270% since January 2015, according to the FBI.

Over 17,000 cases were reported to law enforcement from October 2013 to February 2016, ranging from large corporations and technology companies to small businesses and non-profit organizations. The FBI calculates that this amounts to more than $2.3 billion in losses. 

“The schemers go to great lengths to spoof company e-mail or use social engineering to assume the identity of the CEO, a company attorney, or trusted vendor,” states the FBI warning posted online. “They research employees who manage money and use language specific to the company they are targeting, then they request a wire fraud transfer using dollar amounts that lend legitimacy.”

A recent study by Mimecast corroborates the FBI’s assertion that CEO email scams, or whaling emails, are on the rise.  

Sixty-seven percent of companies noticed an increase in whaling emails from January to March 2016, according to a poll of 436 IT experts by the email management platform.

Mimecast also released a new security feature on Tuesday designed to identify email threats and help companies avoid losses to fraud.

Mimecast’s Impersonation Protect identifies key indications of an attack, such as keywords in an email, to provide a probability score that the target email is either safe or malicious.

Employee education and awareness also play an important role in identifying email threats.

The FBI offered four tips for businesses: be wary of e-mail-only wire transfer requests and requests involving urgency, pick up the phone and verify legitimate business partners, be cautious of mimicked e-mail addresses and practice multi-level authentication.