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ACCA Applied Knowledge · Business and Technology · Regulation and financial crime

A company's finance department receives an email that appears to be from the chief executive, urgently asking for a payment to a new supplier's bank account. The email address differs slightly from the real one. Which type of attack is this most likely to be?

This is business email compromise, or CEO fraud. The attacker impersonates a senior executive using a look-alike email address to pressure staff into making an urgent payment to a fraudulent account. Ransomware, DDoS and SQL injection are technical attacks that do not rely on impersonating a manager.

  1. ARansomware
  2. BBusiness email compromise (CEO fraud)Correct
  3. CDistributed denial-of-service attack
  4. DSQL injection

Explanation

Impersonating a senior executive by email to trigger an urgent payment is business email compromise, also called CEO fraud. Ransomware encrypts data for ransom, DDoS overwhelms systems with traffic, and SQL injection exploits database input fields; none involves impersonation to request payments.

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