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September 30, 2024

Business Email Compromise (BEC) in the Age of AI

Generative AI tools have increased the risk of BEC, and traditional cybersecurity defenses struggle to stay ahead of the growing speed, scale, and sophistication of attacks. Only multilayered, defense-in-depth strategies can counter the AI-powered BEC threat.
Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email
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30
Sep 2024

As people continue to be the weak link in most organizations’ cybersecurity practices, the growing use of generative AI tools in cyber-attacks makes email, their primary communications channel, a more compelling target than ever. The risk associated with Business Email Compromise (BEC) in particular continues to rise as generative AI tools equip attackers to build and launch social engineering and phishing campaigns with greater speed, scale, and sophistication.

What is BEC?

BEC is defined in different ways, but generally refers to cyber-attacks in which attackers abuse email — and users’ trust — to trick employees into transferring funds or divulging sensitive company data.

Unlike generic phishing emails, most BEC attacks do not rely on “spray and pray” dissemination or on users’ clicking bogus links or downloading malicious attachments. Instead, modern BEC campaigns use a technique called “pretexting.”

What is pretexting?

Pretexting is a more specific form of phishing that describes an urgent but false situation — the pretext — that requires the transfer of funds or revelation of confidential data.  

This type of attack, and therefore BEC, is dominating the email threat landscape. As reported in Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigation Report, recently there has been a “clear overtaking of pretexting as a more likely social action than phishing.” The data shows pretexting, “continues to be the leading cause of cybersecurity incidents (accounting for 73% of breaches)” and one of “the most successful ways of monetizing a breach.”

Pretexting and BEC work so well because they exploit humans’ natural inclination to trust the people and companies they know. AI compounds the risk by making it easier for attackers to mimic known entities and harder for security tools and teams – let alone unsuspecting recipients of routine emails – to tell the difference.

BEC attacks now incorporate AI

With the growing use of AI by threat actors, trends point to BEC gaining momentum as a threat vector and becoming harder to detect. By adding ingenuity, machine speed, and scale, generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT give threat actors the ability to create more personalized, targeted, and convincing emails at scale.

In 2023, Darktrace researchers observed a 135% rise in ‘novel social engineering attacks’ across Darktrace / EMAIL customers, corresponding with the widespread adoption of ChatGPT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can draft believable messages that feel like emails that target recipients expect to receive. For example, generative AI tools can be used to send fake invoices from vendors known to be involved with well-publicized construction projects. These messages also prove harder to detect as AI automatically:

  • Avoids misspellings and grammatical errors
  • Creates multiple variations of email text  
  • Translates messages that read well in multiple languages
  • And accomplishes additional, more targeted tactics

AI creates a force multiplier that allows primitive mass-mail campaigns to evolve into sophisticated automated attacks. Instead of spending weeks studying the target to craft an effective email, cybercriminals might only spend an hour or two and achieve a better result.  

Challenges of detecting AI-powered BEC attacks

Rules-based detections miss unknown attacks

One major challenge comes from the fact that rules based on known attacks have no basis to deny new threats. While native email security tools defend against known attacks, many modern BEC attacks use entirely novel language and can omit payloads altogether. Instead, they rely on pure social engineering or bide their time until security tools recognize the new sender as a legitimate contact.  

Most defensive AI can’t keep pace with attacker innovation

Security tools might focus on the meaning of an email’s text in trying to recognize a BEC attack, but defenders still end up in a rules and signature rat race. Some newer Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES) vendors attempt to use AI defensively to improve the flawed approach of only looking for exact matches. Employing data augmentation to identify similar-looking emails helps to a point but not enough to outpace novel attacks built with generative AI.

What tools can stop BEC?

A modern defense-in-depth strategy must use AI to counter the impact of AI in the hands of attackers. As found in our 2024 State of AI Cybersecurity Report, 96% of survey participants believe AI-driven security solutions are a must have for countering AI-powered threats.

However, not all AI tools are the same. Since BEC attacks continue to change, defensive AI-powered tools should focus less on learning what attacks look like, and more on learning normal behavior for the business. By understanding expected behavior on the company’s side, the security solution will be able to recognize anomalous and therefore suspicious activity, regardless of the word choice or payload type.  

To combat the speed and scale of new attacks, an AI-led BEC defense should spot novel threats.

Darktrace / EMAIL™ can do that.  

Self-Learning AI builds profiles for every email user, including their relationships, tone and sentiment, content, and link sharing patterns. Rich context helps in understanding how people communicate and identifying deviations from the normal routine to determine what does and does not belong in an individual’s inbox and outbox.  

Other email security vendors may claim to use behavioral AI and unsupervised machine learning in their products, but their AI are still pre-trained with historical data or signatures to recognize malicious activity, rather than demonstrating a true learning process. Darktrace’s Self Learning-AI truly learns from the organization in which it is installed, allowing it to detect unknown and novel vectors that other security tools are not yet trained on.

Because Darktrace understands the human behind email communications rather than knowledge of past attacks, Darktrace / EMAIL can stop the most sophisticated and evolving email security risks. It enhances your native email security by leveraging business-centric behavioral anomaly detection across inbound, outbound, and lateral messages in both email and Teams.

This unique approach quickly identifies sophisticated threats like BEC, ransomware, phishing, and supply chain attacks without duplicating existing capabilities or relying on traditional rules, signatures, and payload analysis.  

The power of Darktrace’s AI can be seen in its speed and adaptability: Darktrace / EMAIL blocks the most novel threats up to 13 days faster than traditional security tools.

Learn more about AI-led BEC threats, how these threats extend beyond the inbox, and how organizations can adopt defensive AI to outpace attacker innovation in the white paper “Beyond the Inbox: A Guide to Preventing Business Email Compromise.”

Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Carlos Gray
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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April 28, 2026

State of AI Cybersecurity 2026: 87% of security professionals are seeing more AI-driven threats, but few feel ready to stop them

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The findings in this blog are taken from Darktrace’s annual State of AI Cybersecurity Report 2026.

In part 1 of this blog series, we explored how AI is remaking the attack surface, with new tools, models, agents — and vulnerabilities — popping up just about everywhere. Now embedded in workflows across the enterprise, and often with far-reaching access to sensitive data, AI systems are quickly becoming a favorite target of cyber threat actors.

Among bad actors, though, AI is more often used as a tool than a target. Nearly 62% of organizations  experienced a social engineering attack involving a deepfake, or an incident in which bad actors used AI-generated video or audio to try to trick a biometric authentication system, compared to 32% that reported an AI prompt injection attack.

In the hands of attackers, AI can do many things. It’s being used across the entire kill chain: to supercharge reconnaissance, personalize phishing, accelerate lateral movement, and automate data exfiltration. Evidence from Anthropic demonstrates that threat actors have harnessed AI to orchestrate an entire cyber espionage campaign from end to end, allegedly running it with minimal human involvement.

CISOs inhabit a world where these increasingly sophisticated attacks are ubiquitous. Naturally, combatting AI-powered threats is top of mind among security professionals, but many worry about whether their capabilities are up to the challenge.

AI-powered threats at scale: no longer hypothetical

AI-driven threats share signature characteristics. They operate at speed and scale. Automated tools can probe multiple attack paths, search for multiple vulnerabilities and send out a barrage of phishing emails, all within seconds. The ability to attack everywhere at once, at a pace that no human operator could sustain, is the hallmark of an AI-powered threat. AI-powered threats are also dynamic. They can adapt their behavior to spread across a network more efficiently or rewrite their own code to evade detection.

Security teams are seeing the signs that they’re fighting AI-powered threats at every stage of the kill chain, and the sophistication of these threats is testing their resolve and their resources.

  • 73% say that AI-powered cyber threats are having a significant impact on their organization
  • 92% agree that these threats are forcing them to upgrade their defenses
  • 87% agree that AI is significantly increasing the sophistication and success rate of malware
  • 87% say AI is significantly increasing the workload of their security operations team

These teams now confront a challenge unlike anything they’ve seen before in their careers, and the risks are compounding across workflows, tools, data, and identities. It’s no surprise that 66% of security professionals say their role is more stressful today than it was five years ago, or that 47% report feeling overwhelmed at work.

Up all night: Security professionals’ worry list is long

Traditional security methods were never built to handle the complexity and subtlety of AI-driven behavior. Working in the trenches, defenders have deep firsthand experience of how difficult it can be to detect and stop AI-assisted threats.

Increasingly effective social engineering attacks are among their top concerns. 50% of security leaders mentioned hyper-personalized phishing campaigns as one of their biggest worries, while 40% voiced apprehension about deepfake voice fraud. These concerns are legitimate: AI-generated phishing emails are increasingly tailored to individual organizations, business activities, or individuals. Gone are the telltale signs – like grammar or spelling mistakes – that once distinguished malicious communications. Notably, 33% of the malicious emails Darktrace observed in 2025 contained over 1,000 characters, indicating probable LLM usage.

Security leaders also worry about how bad actors can leverage AI to make attacks even faster and more dynamic. 45% listed automated vulnerability scanning and exploit chaining among their biggest concerns, while 40% mentioned adaptive malware.

Confidence is lacking

Protecting against AI demands capabilities that many organizations have not yet built. It requires interpreting new indicators, uncovering the subtle intent within interactions, and recognizing when AI behavior – human or machine – could be suspicious. Leaders know that their current tools aren’t prepared for this. Nearly half don’t feel confident in their ability to defend against AI-powered attacks.

We’ve asked participants in our survey about their confidence for the last three years now. In 2024, 60% said their organizations were not adequately prepared to defend against AI-driven threats. Last year, that percentage shrunk to 45%, a possible indicator that security programs were making progress. Since then, however, the progress has apparently stalled. 46% of security leaders now feel inadequately prepared to protect their organizations amidst the current threat landscape.

Some of these differences are accentuated across different cultures. Respondents in Japan are far less confident (77% say they are not adequately prepared) than respondents in Brazil (where only 21% don’t feel prepared).

Where security programs are falling short

It’s no longer the case that cybersecurity is overlooked or underfunded by executive leadership. Across industries, management recognizes that AI-powered threats are a growing problem, and insufficient budget is near the bottom of most CISO’s list of reasons that they struggle to defend against AI-powered threats.  

It’s the things that money can’t buy – experience, knowledge, and confidence – that are holding programs back. Near the top of the list of inhibitors that survey participants mention is “insufficient knowledge or use of AI-driven countermeasures.” As bad actors embrace AI technologies en masse, this challenge is coming into clearer focus: attack-centric security tools, which rely on static rules, signatures, and historical attack patterns, were never designed to handle the complexity and subtlety of AI-driven attacks. These challenges feel new to security teams, but they are the core problems Darktrace was built to solve.  

Our Self-Learning AI develops a deep understanding of what “normal” looks like for your organization –including unique traffic patterns, end user habits, application and device profiles – so that it can detect and stop novel, dynamic threats at the first encounter. By focusing on learning the business, rather than the attack, our AI can keep pace with AI-powered threats as they evolve.

Explore the full State of AI Cybersecurity 2026 report for deeper insights into how security leaders are responding to AI-driven risks.

Learn more about securing AI in your enterprise.

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April 24, 2026

Email-Borne Cyber Risk: A Core Challenge for the CISO in the Age of Volume and Sophistication

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The challenge for CISOs

Despite continuous advances in security technologies, humans continue to be exploited by attackers. Credential abuse and social actions like phishing are major factors, accounting for around 60% of all breaches. These attacks rely less on technical vulnerabilities and more on exploiting human behavior and organizational processes. 

From my perspective as a former CISO, protecting humans concentrates three of today’s most pressing challenges: the sheer volume of email-based threats, their increasing sophistication, and the limitations of traditional employee awareness programs in moving the needle on risk. 

My personal experience of security awareness training as a CISO

With over 20 years’ experience as an ICT and Cybersecurity leader across various international organizations, I’ve seen security awareness training (SAT) in many guises. And while the cyber landscape is evolving in every direction, the effectiveness of SAT is reaching a plateau.  

Most programs I’ve seen follow a familiar pattern. Training is delivered through a combination of eLearning modules and internal sessions designed to reinforce IT policies. Employees are typically required to complete a slide deck or video, followed by a multiple-choice quiz. Occasional phishing simulations are distributed throughout the year.

The content is often static and unpersonalized, based on known threats that may already be outdated. Every employee regardless of role or risk exposure receives the same training and the same simulated phishing templates, from front-desk staff to the CEO.

The problem with traditional SAT programs

The issue with the approach to SAT outlined above is that the distribution of power is imbalanced. Humans will always be fallible, particularly when faced with increasingly sophisticated attacks. Providing generic, low-context training risks creating false confidence rather than genuine resilience. Let’s look at some of the problems in detail.

Timing and delivery

Employees today operate under constant cognitive load, making lots of rapid decisions every day to reduce their email volumes. Yet if employees are completing training annually, or on an ad hoc basis, it becomes a standalone occurrence rather than a continuous habit.  

As a result, retention is low. Employees often forget the lessons within weeks, a phenomenon known as the ‘Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.’

The graph illustrates that when you first learn something, the information disappears at an exponential rate without retention. In fact, according to the curve, you forget 50% of all new information within a day, and 90% of all new information within a week.  

Simultaneously, most training is conducted within a separate interface. Because it takes place away from the actual moment of decision-making, the "teachable moment" is lost. There is a cognitive disconnect between the action (clicking a link in Outlook) and the education (watching a video in a browser). 

People

In the context of professional risk management, the risks faced by different users are different. Static learning such as everyone receiving the same ‘Password Reset’ email doesn’t help users prepare for the specific threats they are likely to face. It also contributes to user fatigue, driven by repetitive training. And if users receive tests at the same time, news spreads among colleagues, hurting the efficacy of the test.  

Staff turnover introduces further risk. In many organizations, new employees gain access to systems before receiving meaningful training, reducing onboarding to little more than policy acknowledgment.

Measuring success

In my experience, solutions are standalone, without any correlation to other tools in the security stack. In some cases, the programs are delivered by HR rather than the security team, creating a complete silo.  

As a result, SAT is often perceived as a compliance exercise rather than a capability building function. The result is that poor-quality training does little to reduce the likelihood of compromise, regardless of completion rates or quiz performance.

What a modern SAT solution should look like

For today’s CISO, email represents the convergence point of high-volume, high-impact, and human-centric threats. Despite significant security investments, it remains one of the most difficult channels to secure effectively. Given these constraints, CISOs must evolve their approach to SAT.

Success lies in a balanced strategy one that combines advanced technology, attack surface reduction, and pragmatic user enablement, without over-relying on human vigilance as the final line of defense.

This means moving beyond traditional SAT toward continuous, contextual awareness, realistic simulations, and tight integration with security outcomes.

Three requirements for a modern SAT solution

  • Invisible protection: The optimum security solution is one that assists users without impeding their experience. The objective is to enhance human capabilities, rather than simply delivering a lecture. 
  • Real-time feedback: Rather than a monthly quiz, the ideal system would provide a prompt or warning when a user is about to engage with something suspicious. 
  • Positive culture: Shifting the focus away from a "gotcha" culture, which is a contributing factor to a resentment, and instead empowers employees to serve as "sensors" for the company. 

Discover how personalized security coaching can strengthen your human layer and make your email defenses more resilient. Explore Darktrace / Adaptive Human Defense.

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About the author
Karim Benslimane
VP, Field CISO
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