Threat actor Storm-2502 is a reminder that modern BEC doesn’t need malware. It needs access, context, and time inside your mailbox.
This threat actor runs a professional money-laundering operation supporting BEC fraud. Once an email account is compromised, they study invoice threads, vendor relationships, and payment workflows. From there, it’s impersonation, payment redirection, and stolen funds moved through mule networks. Clean. Quiet. Expensive.
The uncomfortable reality is that if mailbox auditing isn’t enabled and reviewed, you won’t know who accessed what, when, or how until finance tells you money is gone.
Mailbox auditing matters because it gives you:
- Visibility into non-owner access to mailboxes
- Evidence of inbox reconnaissance after compromise
- Early signals of impersonation and payment diversion
- Forensic data needed to contain BEC fast and recover losses
Storm-2502 thrives on environments where:
- Admin and user actions blend together
- Cloud tenants look “legitimate”
- Email access goes unmonitored
- Fraud looks like normal business traffic
At a minimum:
- Ensure mailbox auditing is enabled for all users
- Regularly run non-owner mailbox access reports
- Separate admin and user accounts
- Correlate mailbox activity with identity and sign-in risk
- Treat inbox access as a high-value security signal, not a logging checkbox
BEC isn’t an email problem. It’s an identity + visibility problem, and mailbox auditing is one of the fastest ways to shrink an attacker’s dwell time.
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