A process exception
The sender asks an employee to bypass a known approval, callback, payment, payroll, or data-handling step.
Business Email Compromise Awareness
How to Recognize and Report Business Email Compromise
Business email compromise (BEC) uses impersonation or a compromised account to make a business request appear legitimate, often involving money, account details, payroll, documents, or sensitive information.
Use this guide to turn the threat into a clear employee decision, a safe practice scenario, and a reporting step your organization can support.
Plain-English definition • Warning signs • Safe simulation ideas • Reporting practice
01Understand the threat
Business Email Compromise: a practical definition
Business email compromise (BEC) uses impersonation or a compromised account to make a business request appear legitimate, often involving money, account details, payroll, documents, or sensitive information.
Unlike a message that depends on an obviously malicious attachment, BEC may use ordinary language and a plausible workplace process. The request and identity context are often more important than a visible technical warning.
Source: CISA Phishing Guidance
02Recognition clues
Warning signs employees can check in a business email compromise message
No single clue proves that a message is malicious. Teach employees to combine the request, sender, business context, destination, and available verification route before acting.
Changed financial details
A supplier, executive, or colleague appears to introduce a new account, payment route, or urgent transfer instruction.
Identity does not match context
The display name looks familiar, but the address, reply path, writing context, or requested authority does not fit the relationship.
03Safe response
Move from suspicion to a supported next step
| Moment | Employee action | Program preparation |
|---|---|---|
| Before acting | Confirm consequential requests using a known contact and the established approval process, not the reply address or phone number supplied in the message. | Publish the authentic contact, application, or reporting route somewhere employees can reach without using the message. |
| When uncertain | Pause the request and report it through the approved channel with enough context for review. | Explain what the response team needs and how employees will know that their report was received. |
| After an interaction | Stop, contact the responsible team promptly, and describe the action taken without hiding the mistake. | Provide a well-known response route and avoid communications that discourage early reporting. |
Source: NIST: Recognizing, verifying, and reporting phishing
04Practice safely
Business Email Compromise simulation and discussion ideas
Choose one learning objective per exercise. Use fictional people, organizations, accounts, payments, documents, and events, and test the reporting route before sending to employees.
Fictional supplier change
Practice routing an invented bank-detail change through the organization's callback and approval process.
Executive data request
Ask employees to verify an unexpected request for a fictional payroll or finance document through a known internal route.
Mailbox-context exercise
Discuss how a plausible reply in a fictional thread can still require independent verification when the request changes.
05Campaign workflow
Build the exercise around a decision employees can repeat
- 1
Define the behavior
Write down the business email compromise clue being practiced, the expected action, the authorized audience, and the owner of follow-up.
- 2
Confirm the real process
Test the independent verification route, message-reporting option, response handoff, and employee support path from a representative account.
- 3
Pilot the scenario
Check delivery, links, landing content, accessibility, event records, automated inspection, stop conditions, and the explanation employees will receive.
- 4
Review in context
Reconcile intended recipients, successful deliveries, unique employee events, verified reports, response handling, and completed follow-up before drawing conclusions.
Source: NIST SP 800-50 Rev. 1: Building a Cybersecurity and Privacy Learning Program
06Useful measurement
Evaluate recognition, reporting, and the surrounding process
Record actual counts and denominators for delivery, unique recipient events, reports, and follow-up. Separate automated email inspection and repeat events where the available evidence supports doing so.
A business email compromise exercise samples one scenario under one set of conditions. It does not establish an employee's intent, overall security awareness, or likelihood of responding the same way to a real attack.
Use findings to improve the real workflow: clearer verification instructions, easier reporting, faster response handling, better role-specific training, or a business control that reduces reliance on email alone.
Common questions
Common questions about Phishmake's features, onboarding, and support, answered to help you get started with confidence.
Does BEC always include a malicious link?
No. A BEC message may rely entirely on impersonation and a plausible request. Employees need a verification process for consequential requests even when a message contains no link or attachment.
Which teams should receive BEC awareness training?
Prioritize people who handle payments, payroll, supplier data, sensitive documents, executive communications, and customer requests, then adapt scenarios to the authority each role actually has.
Can business email compromise be used in a phishing simulation?
It can be practiced when the scenario is authorized, proportionate, and tied to a real reporting or verification process. Do not initiate a real payment, change production supplier data, use a real executive crisis, or include genuine customer, employee, payroll, tax, or banking information.
How should business email compromise simulation results be measured?
Review successful delivery, unique employee events, reports, response handling, and completed follow-up. Include scenario difficulty and operating context, and do not treat a click or report as a complete measure of employee risk.
Sources & further reading
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