Cybercrime is relentless — and no business is immune. From small startups to global enterprises, organizations face an onslaught of advanced email threats and socially engineered attacks like executive and brand impersonation. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report, phishing and sophisticated email scams led to over $44 million in losses in 2021 alone.
Despite massive investments in perimeter and endpoint security since the rise of remote and hybrid work, phishing and business email compromise (BEC) remain among the most effective and damaging attack vectors. Today’s threat actors exploit clever social engineering tactics that easily slip past even the most advanced email defenses, often gaining the foothold they need to disrupt operations and exploit customer trust.
How Does a Simple Click Turn into a Breach?
Surprisingly simple methods often power highly sophisticated scams. Today’s threat actors excel at impersonating trusted brands, domains, or individuals to steal credentials and gain access to sensitive systems. And they don’t need to break through firewalls — they just need someone to trust the wrong email.
Employees and customers alike tend to assume that anything reaching their inbox is legitimate. Attackers exploit this trust by mimicking people of authority and targeting staff with access to financial systems. A common ruse? A seemingly urgent wire transfer request tied to a fake invoice. The destination? A bank account controlled by the attacker.
Business email compromise (BEC) scams like these cost organizations millions each year. Worse, attackers have expanded their targets beyond the finance team. Even junior employees can unknowingly trigger a breach — sometimes over something as simple as a fake iTunes gift card request. Once inside a compromised inbox, cybercriminals dig through communications to find more angles for fraud.
Simultaneously, attackers launch large-scale phishing campaigns using spoofed domains, fake sender addresses, or compromised infrastructure — maximizing both scale and stealth.
Protecting Customers from Phishing
Early detection is critical in stopping phishing attacks before they cause harm. That’s why Fortra Brand Protection and Fortra Email Security work in tandem to deliver end-to-end customer phishing protection — preventing, detecting, and disrupting threats throughout the phishing lifecycle.
As phishing campaigns grow more frequent and complex, organizations need proactive, intelligent protection. Fortra delivers exactly that, combining email authentication, threat intelligence, risk mitigation, and enforcement. Fortra Email Security analyzes over 2 trillion emails annually across domains from the world’s largest cloud providers. By pairing this scale with third-party sender insights, your organization can ensure only legitimate messages reach customers — while unauthorized emails are blocked at the source.
At the heart of this process is Fortra DMARC Protection, which automates DMARC email authentication and enforcement. When a phishing attack occurs, DMARC identifies suspicious messages via authentication failures. These failure reports are immediately sent — without security operations center (SOC) intervention — to Fortra Brand Protection, triggering real-time mitigation.
This seamless integration accelerates detection, dramatically reducing time to response and neutralizing threats before they spread. In many cases, Fortra Email Security provides deep insights into the attacker’s infrastructure, which Fortra Brand Protection uses to collect evidence and initiate takedowns. Disabling the attacker’s infrastructure not only ends the current campaign — it hinders their ability to launch future phishing attacks.
Detection through Digital Risk Protection
Fortra Digital Risk Protection automatically integrates the intelligence collected from Fortra DMARC Protection into an extensive collection apparatus that consumes a broad range of sources, including:
- Spam feeds
- Domain registrations
- SSL transparency logs
- Passive DNS monitoring
- Active DNS queries
- DMARC failure reports
Fortra Brand Protection continuously mines threat intelligence to proactively detect phishing campaigns at the earliest stages. By integrating insights from Fortra Email Security, it can rapidly identify and neutralize threats using automated kill switches and built-in escalation workflows.
Leveraging Fortra Email Security’s AI-powered analysis, Fortra Brand Protection also targets the underlying infrastructure behind phishing campaigns, disrupting active threats and deterring future attacks before they gain momentum.