Understanding your Organization’s Vendor Fraud and Supply Chain Risk

Interacting with vendors has become an everyday part of doing business. And through these frequent interactions, many of us build a certain level of trust with our vendors over time. Sadly, bad actors are counting on this trust, eager to exploit it.

Businesses that transact with vendors to supply products or services are at risk of Vendor Email Compromise, also known as Vendor Impersonation Fraud. The attacks are sophisticated and once attackers compromise a trusted vendor or third party contact, your business is at risk.

According to the 2022 Email Security Threat Report, the Armorblox research team saw a 73% increase in financial fraud email threats year-over-year from 2021 to 2022. And 44% of these financial fraud attacks were sophisticated, targeted attacks such as wire fraud, invoice fraud, or vendor fraud.

Successful VEC attacks can inflict widespread damage to a business, its partners, customers, and other key stakeholders, resulting in sensitive and confidential data loss, financial loss, and/or reputational burden. Bad actors deploy three main types of tactics across targeted vendor fraud attacks. These include:

• Creating legitimate domains to bypass incumbent security tools
• Spoofing trusted vendor contacts
• Account takeovers of trusted vendor or third-party contacts

In order to prevent these sophisticated email attacks, organizations must employ an email security solution that leverages language signals to identify and track vendor communications and vendor-related business workflows. Email security solutions that provide this sophisticated level of monitoring are key to protecting organizations against targeted vendor fraud and supply chain attacks. These capabilities allow for preventative protection against misaddressed vendor communications, fake invoices, and zero-day phishing attacks.

Armorblox has put together a whitepaper that helps organizations understand their vendor fraud and supply chain risk. This whitepaper includes:

• An overview of  vendor fraud and supply chain attacks
• A list of capabilities security solutions need in order to protect organizations against these types of attacks
• A checklist to easily assess your organization’s risk

Assess your organization’s risk and learn what capabilities your email security solution should have in order to protect against vendor fraud and supply chain attacks.