Business Email Security & BEC Protection

Business email security is the set of controls that keep phishing, malicious attachments, impersonation and account takeover from reaching your people or abusing your mailboxes. Email is still the most common way attackers get into small and midsize businesses, and the most common route to wire fraud. North Star secures email for businesses across the Denver metro area, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins as part of a layered security program.

If you want to train your team to recognize attacks, start with our free guide to spotting phishing. This page covers the other half: the technical protections that stop most attacks before anyone has to make a judgment call.

The Email Threats That Actually Cost Businesses Money

  • Business email compromise (BEC). An attacker gains access to a real mailbox — yours, a vendor’s or a client’s — watches the conversation, then sends convincing instructions to change banking details or pay an invoice. No malware is involved, which is why ordinary filtering misses it.
  • Credential phishing. Fake sign-in pages that capture passwords, and increasingly the session tokens that let an attacker bypass multi-factor authentication.
  • Impersonation and lookalike domains. Messages that appear to come from your owner, your attorney or a trusted supplier, sent from an address one character off.
  • Malicious attachments and links that deliver ransomware or remote-access tools.
  • Spoofing of your own domain to defraud your customers, damaging your reputation even though your systems were never touched.

How We Secure Business Email

Advanced filtering and link and attachment inspection

Inbound mail is screened for known threats, suspicious behavior, impersonation and lookalike senders. Attachments are examined before delivery and links are checked when clicked, not just when the message arrives.

Domain authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC

These DNS records tell receiving mail systems which servers may send as your domain and what to do with messages that fail the check. Configured correctly and moved to an enforcing policy, they stop attackers from sending email that appears to come from your exact domain, and they improve the deliverability of your legitimate mail. We manage them alongside your other domain and DNS records.

Protecting the accounts behind the mailboxes

Most BEC starts with a compromised account. We enforce strong, phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication, restrict sign-ins to trusted devices and locations, block legacy protocols that bypass MFA, and alert on the signs of a takeover, such as new forwarding rules or sign-ins from unexpected places. Our managed detection and response covers identity as well as endpoints, and if a mailbox has already been taken over, our incident response service contains it and finds out what the attacker saw.

Payment verification process

Technology reduces wire-fraud risk; process eliminates most of what remains. We help you put a simple rule in place: any change to payment instructions is verified by phone using a number already on file, never one supplied in the email. For real estate, construction and legal firms, this one step matters more than anything else on this page.

Security awareness training and phishing simulation

Short, regular training and realistic simulated phishing keep your team alert, with reporting that shows who needs more help. It is included in our managed security services.

Email backup and retention

Cloud email is not automatically backed up in a way that survives deletion, ransomware or a malicious insider. We provide independent cloud backup of mail, files and accounts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t the filtering built into our email platform enough?

Built-in filtering catches a lot, and for some businesses, properly configured, it is a reasonable baseline. It is rarely configured to its full capability, and it does little against business email compromise from a legitimate, compromised account. We start by tuning what you already own, then add protection only where the gap justifies it.

What is DMARC and do we need it?

DMARC is a DNS record that tells other mail systems how to handle messages that fail authentication for your domain. Without it, anyone can send email that appears to come from your address. Major email providers now expect bulk senders to publish it, and every business benefits from moving it to an enforcing policy.

How do we stop wire fraud?

Combine protected accounts with a verification rule: any new or changed payment instruction is confirmed by phone using a number you already have on file. Most wire fraud succeeds because that step was skipped.

Find Out How Exposed Your Email Is

A cybersecurity risk assessment checks your domain authentication, account protections and filtering configuration and tells you what to fix first. Call 303-552-0018 or book a time below.