Picture a normal Tuesday. Right now, someone in another country could be signed into your company email – reading your messages, learning how you write, studying your vendors, and waiting for the right invoice to redirect. You wouldn’t know. Most businesses find out only after the money is already gone.
Here’s why criminals love email above almost everything else: your inbox is the master key to your entire business. It resets the passwords for every other account. It holds your contracts and client conversations. And it carries the weight of your name. That’s why attackers often skip the dramatic hacking and simply trick or buy their way into an inbox. The FBI reports that email-based business and wire scams cost victims $2.77 billion in a single recent year – more than ransomware – and most of it begins with one compromised or impersonated account.
In plain terms, it usually goes like this: an employee lands on a convincing fake login page, types in their password and even their verification code, and the attacker captures both. Modern attacks can sail right past a basic texted code. Now they’re inside. They’ll often set up a quiet rule that forwards a copy of every email to themselves, then sit back, learn your rhythms, and at just the right moment send a perfectly worded message changing the wire instructions on a real invoice.
The liability lands on you. If your account is used to defraud a client or a vendor, you’re left holding the lost funds, the damaged relationship, the call to your insurer, and possibly a conversation with a regulator if protected information was exposed along the way.
Protecting against this is very doable:
- Sign-in protection strong enough that a stolen password and code still aren’t enough to get in.
- Continuous monitoring of who’s logging into your Microsoft 365 or Google accounts – from where, and on what device – so an impossible “signed in from Santa Cruz and Singapore ten minutes apart” login triggers an alarm and a locked account, not a wire transfer.
- Automatic detection of the tell-tale signs of a takeover: brand-new forwarding rules, sudden mass downloads, logins through anonymizing services.
- A regular review of account settings, because these hidden rules get planted and then forgotten.
The whole point is to catch a break-in in the minutes it’s happening – not the weeks afterward. We set up and actively watch Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace accounts for exactly this. Want to know if someone’s already poking around in yours? Get a quote.