In 2023, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 21,489 BEC complaints with adjusted losses over $2.9 billion USD, according to their 2023 Internet Crime Report. By way of comparison, ransomware, the cyber attack that grabs all the headlines and keeps IT and security teams up at night, accounted for only 2,825 complaints, with adjusted losses of less than $60 million USD.

Since April 2024, Arctic Wolf has been tracking an ongoing campaign by Black Basta ransomware group affiliates leveraging Microsoft’s Quick Assist for initial access. The Black Basta affiliates have been conducting vishing (voice phishing) attacks by impersonating IT or help desk personnel, claiming they need to fix an issue on the victim’s device. In other instances, the threat actors leverage an email bomb attack to flood the victim’s mailbox with emails from subscription services.

On February 19, 2024, ConnectWise published a security bulletin detailing two critical vulnerabilities within their on-premises ScreenConnect software, stating that the vulnerabilities have the potential to result in remote code execution (RCE). ScreenConnect is a widely utilized Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tool that has been leveraged by threat actors in the past, often in connection with ransomware attacks.

Cybersecurity compliance is complicated. As industry standards change and evolve with new technology, so do compliance requirements. Depending on your organization’s operations, industry, or even location, compliance could mean adhering to multiple frameworks and reporting to multiple governing bodies. In fact, 67% of organizations surveyed by Arctic Wolf follow between one to three sets of guidelines.

When it comes to cybercrime, there are few tactics as useful and widespread as credential theft and the use of stolen credentials. In the 2023 breach of password management giant Okta, it was a set of credentials that jumpstarted the incident — threat actors hacked into an employee’s personal Google account, where they found an Okta customer service account had also been saved.