At a closing or a payment run, a criminal who has watched your email can swap in their own wire instructions and take six figures in minutes. We harden your email and identity so the fake never looks real, and add an out-of-band callback so no changed instruction is paid until it is verified.
Business email compromise is the costliest cybercrime the FBI tracks, with billions in reported losses each year and small offices well represented in the totals (FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center).
For a small office the exposure is concrete: the wired funds themselves, the dispute over who is liable for the loss, the cost and reputation hit of telling a client their down payment is gone, and a cyber-insurance claim that can be denied if you cannot show the controls you said you had.
The same controls keep the fraud from clearing, and they are the exact controls a cyber-insurance carrier asks about, so this work also protects your ability to qualify, bind, and keep a claim from being denied.
Email authentication
Your domain is set to reject mail that fails authentication, so an attacker cannot send convincing mail as your firm and a spoofed instruction does not land in the first place.
Identity
MFA across email and every account that can reach funds or instructions, set up to resist the prompt-bombing and token-theft that defeat basic text-code MFA. A stolen password by itself is not enough to get in.
Detection
The first thing a compromised account does is hide itself with a quiet auto-forward or a delete rule. Those changes are monitored and flagged, so a takeover is caught before the wire request arrives.
Procedure
A written procedure that no change to wire or payment instructions is acted on until it is confirmed by phone to a number you already had on file, not a number from the email. The control that stops the fraud at the last step.
Written by Hammad Arain, founder of Arain Systems. CCNA, CompTIA Security+, Microsoft AZ-104. Updated June 2026. Educational, not legal advice.
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