Businesses and individuals exchange more than 300 billion emails each day. Because email is such a ubiquitous part of life, it can be easy to overlook its inherent vulnerability.

In reality, even with protections put in place by internal IT departments or outside partners, email remains an unsecured and unreliable technology capable of being hacked, altered, and manipulated. According to recent research by Chubb:

• Cybercriminals stole more than $28 billion through email fraud from 2016 to 2020, with an average loss per incident of more than $150,000.
• Since the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020, cybersecurity risks have increased for organizations because many employees have shifted to working from home over less-secure Wi-Fi networks.
• At the same time, to maintain their revenue, many businesses have adopted or increased their use of e-commerce and electronic transactions with their partners and customers.

When combined, these factors have created an even busier environment for cybercriminals to exploit email for fraudulent activities. A late 2020 survey by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that more than 80 percent of respondents across different organization types had observed an increase in cyber fraud since the pandemic began. This included business email compromise and payment fraud.

Schemes are constantly evolving, requiring businesses to adopt procedures that guard against intrusions. While email attacks in the past focused on delivering links and attachments with malicious code, today's cybercriminals are employing more sophisticated social engineering attacks that are designed to manipulate a sender's identity, intercept important messages, and send messages that appear authentic to recipients. Without attachments or files that would be detected by malware-scanning systems, these emails can readily pass through basic security defenses.