From CEO Fraud to Vendor Fraud: The Shift to Financial Supply Chain Compromise

Since its initial identification in 2013, business email compromise (BEC) has been dominated by executive impersonation. But over the past few years, attackers have adjusted their strategies—opting to impersonate third party vendors and suppliers instead. In January 2022, the number of attacks impersonating third parties surpassed those impersonating internal employees for the first time. This trend has continued each month since, with third-party impersonations making up 52% of all BEC attacks in May 2022. We’ve seen this shift to what we’ve termed financial supply chain compromise for a number of reasons, most notably because it gives threat actors a plethora of additional trusted identities to exploit. Even the smallest businesses likely work with at least one vendor, and larger companies have supplier numbers in the hundreds or thousands. And while the average employee has some level of familiarity with the company’s executive team, they may not have that same awareness of the organization’s entire vendor ecosystem—particularly in larger enterprises. Further, the vendor-customer dynamic has an intrinsic financial aspect to it, which means emails requesting payments or referencing bank account changes are less likely to raise red flags.

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