Cloud-based email management firm Mimecast Ltd has announced the general availability of Impersonation Protect, a new service billed as the first cloud product that directly combats spear-phishing email attacks where company officers are impersonated, also known by names including CEO Fraud, Business Email Compromise or whaling.

The new product uses advanced scanning techniques to prevent attacks by monitoring all email traffic for elements commonly used by criminals, including employee and domain names, and other keywords like ‘wire transfer,’ ‘tax form’ or ‘urgent.’

Using the product, IT administrators and security organizations can now block suspicious emails or choose to display additional security warnings for employee awareness.

“Email remains a highly popular attack vector for cybercriminals, for good reason: it is one of the most direct paths to entry into the enterprise, and it relies heavily (and all too often, successfully) on human behavior to assure initial penetration,” Information Security Research Director Scott Crawford said in a statement sent to SiliconANGLE. “This means that attackers will continue to prioritize email – and defenses must level up accordingly.”

“Whaling … is becoming a more frequent variant of spear-phishing, and is a tactic cybercriminals are using with great success. These and similar CEO–fraud attacks would benefit from a security approach tailored to the changing threat landscape, such as in–context user awareness training where users receive not only warnings and guidance about the threat of clicking on phishing links or opening up malware-laden attachments, but also indicators of fraudulent emails masked as executive communications.”

New research

Following on from its whaling report in December, Mimecast conducted a survey of 436 IT experts at organizations in the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia in March 2016, and found that respondents reported significant growth in whaling attacks.

67 percent of respondents said they had seen an increase in attacks designed to instigate fraudulent payments since the beginning of January 2016 and 43 percent saw an increase in attacks specifically asking for confidential data like human resources records or tax information.

Impersonation Protect is available now and is able to defend on-premises, hybrid and pure cloud email deployments including Microsoft Office 365.

Existing customers of Mimemecast Targeted Threat Protection get the new product for free.

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