BEC Protection Tools 2026
BEC protection covers the tools built to stop business email compromise: the payloadless attacks where someone impersonates your CEO, a vendor, or a payroll system to push an employee into wiring money, changing bank details, or handing over credentials. These messages rarely carry malware or a malicious link, so the signature-based filters in your email gateway tend to wave them straight through. This subcategory of Email & Messaging Security is for teams that keep getting burned by social engineering that looks entirely legitimate on the wire. If finance has ever nearly paid a fraudulent invoice, this is the layer you are missing.
We cover 2 BEC Protection tools, 0 free and 2 commercial.
Accuracy and depth improve over time. Last reviewed Jun 2026. Is something off? Reach out.
FEATURED
AI-based workflow detecting suspicious email rule changes tied to BEC attacks.
Browser extension that cryptographically signs emails to prevent BEC attacks
How to choose BEC Protection tools
- Confirm the detection model goes past pattern matching: it should profile sender identity, prior communication history, and payment or data-request intent, not just scan for bad links and attachments.
- Check coverage of vendor and supplier impersonation, not only internal CEO fraud. Vendor email compromise is where the largest wire losses tend to land.
- Choose between API deployment and inline routing. API integration with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace rolls out faster and can retract delivered mail; inline blocks before delivery but adds a mail-flow dependency.
- Test the false-positive rate on your own live traffic during a pilot. A BEC tool that quarantines legitimate finance and executive mail gets switched off fast.
- Verify it covers internal account takeover, since compromised real mailboxes are a primary BEC vector and signature tools see nothing wrong with them.
- Look at what happens after detection: clear analyst context, automated clawback or quarantine, and ties into your SOC workflow matter more than a raw alert nobody can triage.
BEC Protection Tools FAQ
Common questions about BEC Protection tools, selection guides, pricing, and comparisons.
BEC protection is the set of tools that detect and block business email compromise, where an attacker impersonates a trusted person or company to trigger a fraudulent payment, a bank-detail change, or a credential handover. Because these emails usually carry no malware or malicious link, BEC tools lean on behavioral analysis, identity and relationship modeling, and language cues rather than signatures or attachment scanning.
A secure email gateway and most anti-phishing tools hunt for known-bad indicators: malicious attachments, spoofed domains, blocklisted URLs. BEC attacks deliberately avoid all of those. They arrive from a real, often compromised account and ask for something plausible. BEC protection adds identity and relationship context, payment-intent detection, and anomaly modeling to catch the social engineering itself, which is why it usually layers on top of a gateway rather than replacing it.
Start with the detection approach: does it model sender identity, communication history, and payment intent, or merely match patterns? Check how it handles vendor email compromise and supplier impersonation, not just internal CEO fraud. Look at API versus inline deployment, the false-positive rate on your real traffic, and whether it covers internal account takeover. A short pilot on live mail is the only honest test.
Often yes. Native Microsoft and Google protections catch plenty of commodity phishing and malware, but BEC is precisely where they struggle because the email looks legitimate and behaves normally. Many teams add a dedicated BEC layer through the provider API to catch impersonation, vendor fraud, and account takeover the platform filters wave through. Whether you need it turns on your payment exposure and how far you have tuned native controls.
