Stop Business Email Compromise with Intent Analysis

Problem

BEC Attacks Are More Sophisticated Than Ever

Business Email Compromise (BEC) is no longer just about executive impersonation. Threat actors now mimic all employees, vendors, and partners with high accuracy—leveraging tactics such as brand impersonation, typo-squatting, combo-squatting and social engineering to bypass security filters and trick recipients into financial fraud, data theft or scams which will cause damage to business.

Far more than just spoofed executive emails, BEC has grown to include impersonating customers and vendors, providing the initial lure in a multi-stage campaign, and of course the increasingly seen gift card, wire transfer, fake invoice, aging report, W-2 , direct deposit, and acquisition scams.

Problem^AI

BEC to the Power of AI = Exponential Risk

The rise of Generative AI and cost-effective models like DeepSeek means that threat actors can now power their campaigns with exponential scale, precision and variance—for global attacks with business-accurate details and continuous variation.

This isn’t just an evolution—it’s an arms race.

Scale

AI tools like FraudGPT, GhostGPT, and DeepSeek can generate an exponentially higher volume of campaigns, across languages and geographic regions, target more victims with less effort.

Precision

Attackers use GenAI to accurately mimic business communications—shifting BEC from just VIP impersonation to any business interaction: customers, vendors, employees and more.

Variance

GenAI allows for iteration and variation of messages to bypass keyword filters and legacy security, with dynamic adjustments to tone, urgency, and structure based on the target.

Solution^AI

Intent-Based Security to Stop Human and AI-Powered BEC

A new class of attacks requires a new class of protection. That's why we built NACE^TM with a novel set of features purpose built to address the evasive and AI-powered attacks that bypass previous technologies.

NACE^TM understands the intent of an email, based on multi-layered semantic analysis. The contextual relationship between intent and SMTP headers aids to identify BEC attempts.

The NACE^TM zero-trust layer uses zero-shot classification with LLMs for analysis. If an email contains known threat actor tacics, and has an executive’s display name—but isn't flagged as malicious—an SMS alert is sent to notify the sender of the request made in their name.

NACE^TM understands intent to fundamentally change BEC detection.

Pre-Trained Classifier

The NACE^TM fine-tuned, pre-trained neural networks models have been trained on over a decade of the linguistic cues, tone, sentiments, emotions and semantics used in BEC attacks, to detect BEC exploitation.

Thematic Analysis

NACE^TM provides thematic insights by generating a structured representation of topics, phrases, and subtopics. This identifies the underlying themes, even when variations occur, adding an extra layer of detection for Gen AI iteration.

Zero-Shot Classification

Generative AI can introduce semantic variations of emails while keeping the same intent. By harnessing the power of an LLM, NACE^TM identifies these semantic variations through zero-shot classification, detecting any variants generated by AI.

Similarity Analysis

NACE^TM similarity analysis ensures that the semantics of each incoming message are extracted, embeddings are computed, and cosine similarity is measured against pre-stored embeddings of semantics commonly used by threat actors to deliver BEC messages.

Why Inception Cyber for BEC

AI-powered threats demand AI-powered defense.

InceptionCyber is leading the way in stopping the next generation of BEC attacks—before they reach your employees' inboxes.

Intent-Based Analysis

An intent-based approach to detecting Business Email Compromise (BEC) goes beyond simply recognizing that an email is malicious. It focuses on identifying the underlying intent behind the attacker's actions—whether it’s a fraudulent money transfer request, a payroll change, a fake customer communication etc. By understanding the attacker’s specific goals, security teams can implement more precise and effective defenses.

Instant Protection

Unlike the traditional approach of User Behavior Analysis to detect BEC, which requires collecting data, building user profiles, and creating a time lag for detection until the profile is built to compute deviation, intent-based analysis offers protection from day one. This method eliminates the need for historical data collection, providing immediate defense against potential threats

Zero-Shot Classification

The use of multiple zero-shot analyses strengthens resilience against semantic variations introduced by Generative AI.

Zero Trust Validation

The NACE^TM zero-trust layer ensures that if the intent of an email matches the tactics of a threat actor using an executive’s display name but isn’t flagged as malicious, an SMS alert is sent to notify the individual of the request made on their behalf.

10 Minutes to Value

Since we don't need to build deep employee datasets—which take other vendors 30 days or more—our NACE^TM pre-trained model begins stopping threats as soon as it is deployed.

Read how NACE^TM is Stopping BEC

See our walkthroughs and step-by-step breakdowns of real-world BEC attacks, and how Inception Cyber NACE^TM stops them when other technologies can't.

Deep Dive: NACE Combats BEC Customer Impersonation Employing Combosquatting

Research

Abhishek Singh, Inception Cyber Co-Founder and CTO

Quick Read: BEC Strategy: Customer and Brand Impersonation Tactics Observed: Sender’s domain used combosquatting to impersonate a real brand. Hiding intended recipients by ...

Abhishek Singh, Inception Cyber Co-Founder and CTO

From Deception to Detection: Unmasking a Highly Targeted BEC Attack

Research

Shray Kapoor, Principal Research Scientist Engineer

Quick Read: BEC Strategy: Brand Impersonation / Fake customer Tactics Observed: Professional and Relevant Messaging: A well-written email with industry-specific content that ...

Shray Kapoor, Principal Research Scientist Engineer

Why Inception Cyber Stands Apart in Email Security

Phishing

Bill Mann, Co-founder and CEO

This week, we published two blogs highlighting real-world email attacks caught by our platform. One attack targeted a CFO with a credential phishing attempt, while another ...

Bill Mann, Co-founder and CEO

Unmasking Vendor Registration Scams: Insights from Two Real-World BEC Cases

Research

Shray Kapoor, Principal Research Scientist Engineer

Quick Read: BEC Strategy: Vendor Impersonation & Fake Vendor Registration Tactics Observed: Use of free email providers to evade SPF, DKIM, sender domain, and IP reputation ...

Shray Kapoor, Principal Research Scientist Engineer

Transforming BEC Protection Against Generative AI Evasions with Deep Learning, Zero-Shot Classification, and Zero-Trust Principles

Email Security Trends

Abhishek Singh, Inception Cyber Co-Founder and CTO

See What BEC Attacks Your Tools are Missing

Whether you're looking to add defense in depth, replace a legacy secure email gateway, or just see whether employee behavior-based tools are actually as good as they promise, we welcome every chance to go head-to-head with the previous generations of email security.

See what BEC threats are slipping through your defenses with our free assessment.

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Intent-Based Protection Against Business Email Compromise