BEC and Phishing Susceptibility
Stop Guessing. Get Your Grade. Quantify the External BEC Susceptibility Risk Your Board Can't Ignore.
As a CISO, you have invested heavily in internal defense—MFA, advanced email gateways, and security training. That is table stakes. But modern threat actors don't attack your firewall; they weaponize publicly available data to build highly targeted spear-phishing campaigns. Your current security rating is blind to these preemptive, external threats. ThreatNG introduces the definitive BEC Susceptibility Security Rating (A-F), consolidating seven critical external risk factors from Compromised Credentials and advanced Web3 Domain Phishing Vectors to Lawsuit Sentiment Risk into one objective score. Use this Predictive BEC Surface Management (PBSM) grade to silence doubt, justify budget, and restore CISO Confidence in your external security posture.
Quantify Material Financial Risk for the Board
Your liability is public record. ThreatNG is the only rating solution that incorporates the Lawsuits Investigation Module to identify and analyze publicly disclosed litigation against your organization. This capability measures how organizational events, such as regulatory actions, financial distress, or pending lawsuits, are actively used by threat actors to create highly believable BEC lures. This analysis moves beyond technical vulnerability, providing the CISO with an SEC-ready metric to justify budget, prioritize remediation, and report material financial risk with unwavering clarity to the Board. You gain the confidence to speak about cyber risk in the language of finance.
Gain Control with a Single Source of Truth (A-F)
The noise ends here. Instead of manually correlating fragmented data across tools for Email Format Guessability, Domain Permutations, and Mail Record exposure, the ThreatNG A-F grade consolidates critical external factors into one objective, easy-to-digest score. We translate complex external attack vectors into a straightforward metric that drives immediate, prioritized action, ensuring you know exactly where to focus your limited resources to achieve an 'A' grade.
Expose the Next-Generation Phishing Attack Chain
We fight the enemy with superior intelligence. Our comprehensive analysis of emerging Web3 Domains and full Domain Name Permutations catches the impersonation schemes your legacy External Attack Surface Management (EASM) tools miss. By proactively finding and prioritizing the vulnerabilities that matter most—such as Compromised Credentials and weaponized impersonation domains—we enable you and your security team to disrupt the sophisticated BEC attack chain at the reconnaissance phase, before they even send the first fraudulent email.
BEC Phishing Susceptibility Security Ratings Cybersecurity Risk Ratings Score
The ThreatNG BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Score utilizes a letter grading system (A-F) to communicate the severity of your organization's vulnerability to Business Email Compromise (BEC) and phishing attacks. This grading system aligns with the ThreatNG Digital Presence Triad, providing a clear picture of the risk based on three key factors:
Feasibility
Assesses how easy it would be for attackers to launch a successful BEC or phishing campaign against your organization. Grade A indicates a highly secure environment with strong defenses against email spoofing, social engineering tactics, and credential theft. Conversely, Grade F signifies a vulnerable environment with weaknesses that attackers could easily exploit.
Believability
Evaluates the likelihood of attackers targeting your organization or individuals. A low score (A) suggests a low chance of being targeted, often due to factors like strong brand security or lack of publicly available financial information. A high score (F) indicates a high likelihood of being targeted due to the organization's industry, financial profile, or presence of high-profile individuals.
Impact
Considers the potential consequences of a successful BEC or phishing attack. Grade A signifies minimal potential damage, such as a single compromised account. Grade F indicates a scenario with severe consequences, such as large-scale financial losses, data breaches, reputational damage, or disruption of critical operations.
How the Grades Translate to Severity
A (Low Severity)
Your organization has strong email security measures, a low attacker interest, and minimal potential impact if compromised by a BEC or phishing attack.
B (Moderate Severity)
While your organization might have weaknesses in email security, attacker interest is still considered low, or the potential impact is manageable.
C (Medium Severity)
This indicates a balance between the ease of launching an attack (Feasibility), the likelihood of being targeted (Believability), and the potential consequences (Impact). Remediating these moderate risks is recommended to strengthen your organization's defenses.
D (High Severity)
Your organization shows vulnerabilities in email security or awareness training that could be exploited with moderate attacker interest or could lead to significant consequences if a BEC or phishing attack is successful. Urgent action is needed to address these vulnerabilities and implement more robust security measures.
F (Critical Severity)
This signifies the highest risk scenario. Your organization has critical weaknesses in email security or awareness training, is highly likely to be targeted by BEC or phishing attacks, and could suffer severe consequences if compromised. Immediate remediation is crucial to prevent attackers from exploiting these vulnerabilities.
Unveiling Phishing Threats: Actionable Intelligence with ThreatNG
The ThreatNG BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Score breaks the mold of traditional email security solutions by offering a wealth of actionable insights fueled by a powerful combination of data and intelligence. This approach empowers organizations to proactively manage phishing risks and prevent financial losses, data breaches, and reputational damage. Here's how ThreatNG delivers superior value:
Actionable Insights and Data-Driven Objectivity
ThreatNG goes beyond simply identifying phishing vulnerabilities. The score analyzes your organization, third-party vendors, and the supply chain by leveraging External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and Digital Risk Protection (DRP) capabilities. This comprehensive view, bolstered by vast intelligence repositories, paints an objective picture of your BEC and phishing susceptibility. With this data-driven approach, you gain actionable insights pinpointing specific weaknesses in email security, social engineering susceptibility, and brand reputation. It allows you to prioritize remediation efforts and make informed decisions to strengthen your defenses.
Continuous Monitoring and Improvement
ThreatNG is not just a one-time assessment tool. Its continuous monitoring capabilities provide ongoing security insights, allowing you to track progress on addressing vulnerabilities and identify new phishing tactics as they emerge. This feature empowers a proactive security posture, enabling you to adapt and improve your email security posture and employee awareness training over time, ensuring your organization stays ahead of evolving threats.
Comparison and Benchmarking
The ThreatNG score allows for comparison and benchmarking against industry standards or your historical data. This comparative analysis helps you understand your phishing susceptibility relative to others and measure the effectiveness of your security awareness training and email security measures over time.
Actionable Recommendations
The score doesn't just highlight problems; it provides clear, actionable recommendations for addressing BEC and phishing vulnerabilities. These recommendations are tailored to the specific details of your email security posture, employee training gaps, and brand reputation risks. It empowers you to prioritize resources and focus on the most critical areas that significantly reduce your susceptibility to phishing attacks.
Transparency Through External Validation
ThreatNG's scoring system is not just clear; it's transparent. It is substantiated by the results of EASM, DRP, and extensive intelligence repositories, providing a verifiable and objective assessment of your BEC and phishing susceptibility. This transparency fosters trust and empowers stakeholders to confidently make informed security decisions to safeguard your organization and its assets.
Don't Miss the Bigger Picture: ThreatNG Unveils a Spectrum of Digital Risks
The ThreatNG BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Score is a powerful tool, but it's just one piece of the puzzle within ThreatNG's comprehensive security assessment suite. While this specific score focuses on email-based threats, ThreatNG offers a broader range of Susceptibility and Exposure ratings that paint a holistic picture of your organization's digital security posture, third-party vendors, and entire supply chain.
Interconnected Threats
Security vulnerabilities in one area can have cascading effects across your digital ecosystem. A compromised third-party vendor, for instance, can expose your organization to data leaks or ransomware attacks. ThreatNG's suite of ratings helps you identify and address these interconnected threats.
Prioritized Action
By assessing various vulnerabilities, you gain a prioritized view of your security risks. It allows you to focus resources on the areas with the most significant potential impact, maximizing your security investments.
Supply Chain Security
Today's businesses are reliant on complex supply chains. ThreatNG's assessments extend beyond your organization, providing visibility into the security posture of your vendors and partners and creating a more secure digital ecosystem.
ThreatNG's Spectrum of Security Ratings:
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility Score
Identifies weaknesses in subdomain configurations that could allow attackers to take control.
Brand Damage Susceptibility
Evaluate the likelihood of negative brand impacts due to security incidents, financial violations, or social responsibility concerns.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility
Assesses the likelihood of falling victim to ransomware attacks, considering exposed ports, known vulnerabilities, and dark web presence
Cyber Risk Exposure
This section provides a broad view of external attack surface vulnerabilities, encompassing the technology stack, cloud environments, and code exposure.
Data Leak Susceptibility
Measures the potential for data breaches based on cloud configurations, SaaS usage, and code repository security.
ESG Exposure
Evaluate the organization's environmental, social, and governance practices to identify potential security risks.
Mobile App Exposure
Assesses the severity of security vulnerabilities within an organization's mobile apps, such as exposed credentials and API keys. These vulnerabilities can increase susceptibility to BEC, phishing, and other attacks, impacting the overall security posture.
Supply Chain & Third Party Exposure
Analyzes the security posture of your vendors and partners, highlighting potential vulnerabilities within your supply chain.
Web Application Hijacking Susceptibility
Analyzes web applications for vulnerabilities attackers could exploit.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): ThreatNG BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Rating (A-F)
The Problem—Quantifying Financial & Human Risk
-
Traditional security ratings often focus on broad technical metrics like patching cadence and network security. The ThreatNG BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Rating is specifically engineered to address the most significant external financial threat facing enterprises: Business Email Compromise (BEC), which accounted for nearly $8.5 billion in losses reported to the FBI’s IC3 over the last three years. This rating shifts the focus from general posture to predictive susceptibility, measuring the specific external factors an attacker exploits before they launch a high-cost social engineering attack. It provides the critical intelligence required to manage what attackers target most: the human and procedural layers of your organization.
-
The rating directly quantifies human-centric risk factors that conventional EASM often misses. It measures susceptibility across two key human-centric pillars :
Compromised Credentials (via DarCache Rupture): This identifies specific login pairs exposed on the Dark Web, which attackers use for initial access and account takeover (ATO) to stage a convincing BEC attack.
Email Format Guessability: This analyzes observable patterns in employee email addresses to assess how easily an attacker can validate and confirm target credentials for a successful spearphishing campaign.
By grading these factors, the rating transforms the "People Problem" from an abstract training challenge into a quantifiable, measurable risk that demands immediate technical remediation.
-
The External Adversary View is ThreatNG’s core philosophy: performing a continuous, unauthenticated, outside-in assessment of your attack surface in the same manner a sophisticated threat actor would.
The A-F rating is the resulting metric that translates these attacker-centric findings into quantifiable risk. For example, when ThreatNG identifies highly guessable email formats, it aligns this finding directly with MITRE ATT&CK techniques (specifically, T1586.002, Compromise Infrastructure: Domain), allowing security leaders to prioritize based on the adversary’s likely path of exploitation. This ensures that remediation efforts are strategically focused on preempting known adversarial behaviors, rather than just closing generic technical ports.
Technical Differentiation and Coverage
-
The BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Rating is based on seven proprietary pillars. Beyond standard checks for missing DMARC and SPF records, the platform provides specialized intelligence in the following areas :
Financial Materiality: Lawsuits (Sentiment and Financials Investigation Module) scans public legal records and SEC filings (including DarCache 8-K) for documented fraud or data loss, providing real-world evidence of risk.
Active Threat Infrastructure: Domain Permutations with Mail Record identifies impersonation domains that are not only registered (typosquatting) but actively configured with mail exchange (MX) records, signaling an imminent, operational threat.
Emerging Attack Vectors: Web3 Domains (available and taken) proactively monitors decentralized domain systems (e.g.,.eth,.crypto) for brand squatting and use in decentralized identity fraud schemes.
These unique pillars ensure the A-F score is a specialized, predictive indicator of financial fraud, not just a general IT hygiene report.
-
The BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Rating is a critical module within the ThreatNG all-in-one External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Digital Risk Protection (DRP), and Security Ratings solution.
The A-F score is calculated using data gathered by the core External Discovery engine and is centrally managed within the Reconnaissance Hub. This integration eliminates tool sprawl by consolidating disparate data streams—like Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture) and Domain Permutations—into a single, actionable score. This provides security teams with a single-pane-of-glass view to manage the entire external digital footprint effectively.
Executive Impact and Liability Mitigation
-
The Lawsuits Investigation Module provides the CISO with objective, verifiable evidence that directly links external risk to potential financial materiality, a core concern for the Board and regulators.
Financial Materiality & SEC Disclosures
By tracking legal filings and public records, including SEC Form 8-Ks and general litigation, the module identifies if and how publicly disclosed organizational distress (like financial trouble, large-scale layoffs, or major regulatory actions) can be weaponized by threat actors. This analysis helps the CISO identify material factors that could make an investment risky, a key SEC disclosure requirement. This information empowers the CISO to speak to the Board about cyber risk in terms of quantified, externally validated financial liability rather than abstract technical vulnerabilities.
GRC Mapping and Personal Liability Mitigation
ThreatNG provides an External GRC Assessment capability, mapping identified external security gaps directly to compliance frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST CSF. A poor A-F grade immediately translates into actionable compliance deficiencies that justify budget and demonstrate proactive risk management. By showing the Board and auditors that your team is actively monitoring and mitigating risks identified via public information (like lawsuits), the CISO can significantly mitigate personal liability and demonstrate a structured, auditable approach to governance, risk, and compliance.
-
The true value of an 'A' grade is the provision of Executive Confidence, Control, and Defensibility.
Achieving a high A-F score signals to the board, investors, and regulators that the CISO has proactively identified, quantified, and minimized the external attack surface highly susceptible to financial fraud. This transforms complex technical data into a universally understood metric of organizational resilience, simplifying reporting and allowing the CISO to move from a reactive position of constant anxiety to a confident steward of corporate financial integrity. The A-F score acts as objective proof that due diligence has been exercised against one of the most financially crippling modern cyber threats.
Security Ratings Use Cases
ThreatNG is a security rating platform enabling businesses to evaluate and monitor their security posture and that of their third-party vendors. By leveraging our extensive security information database, ThreatNG provides valuable insights into potential vulnerabilities and risk exposure, enabling organizations to take proactive measures to strengthen their security defenses. This section will explore some use cases where ThreatNG's security ratings can help organizations better understand their security posture and mitigate risk.