What Is an Impersonation Attack? How Attackers Trick Victims Into Paying Invoices or Sharing Private Data

Cybercriminals constantly evolve their tactics to deceive individuals and organizations. One particularly deceptive method involves attackers pretending to be someone they’re not to gain trust, access sensitive information, or carry out fraudulent activities. This attack is also known as an impersonation attack.

With impersonation attacks appearing more frequently across email, social media, and enterprise communication channels, security teams must understand their mechanisms and develop effective detection and response strategies.

An impersonation attack is a type of cybercrime where a criminal poses as a known person or organization to steal confidential data or money. Attackers use social engineering tactics to assume an identity, either by compromising an account or creating a lookalike, and ask unsuspecting victims to complete routine tasks like paying an invoice, sharing a file, or clicking a link.

Once this is done, they trick victims into performing some everyday actions. These actions, such as paying an invoice, sharing a file, or clicking a link, appear quite normal, and victims don’t even realize that they are being targeted. This specific tactic is common in scams such as CEO fraud, business email compromise (BEC), and supply chain attacks.

In fact, in 2024, the Internet Crime Complaint Center received 21,442 BEC complaints. This resulted in adjusted losses that exceeded $2.77 billion. This means that a single successful BEC attack can cost businesses an average of around $129,186.

The tricky part is that impersonation attacks are hard to detect and stop, mainly because they take advantage of human trust, not just technical weaknesses. This article will help you understand how these attacks work, recognize the signs early on, and learn how to protect your organization before it’s too late.

Understanding how impersonation attacks work will help you spot and stop these attacks before they do damage. More often than not, impersonation threats are delivered as an email attack and follow a predictable pattern.

First, the attacker selects a target, typically someone who has control over financial transactions or access to sensitive data. Employees in departments like accounting, legal, and human resources are prime candidates. They hold the keys to valuable information, and attackers know it.

Then, the attacker begins gathering intelligence. They comb through public sources like company websites, social media profiles, press releases, and LinkedIn to build a detailed picture of the target’s role. They learn who the target works with, which vendors they manage, and which executives they report to. Every bit of information helps create a believable setup.

Armed with this background, the attacker chooses someone familiar to impersonate. This could be a CEO, a department head, or a frequent business contact, someone whose name would prompt immediate attention and trust.

Using their new identity, the attacker sets the trap. Sometimes they spoof an email address that looks nearly identical to the real one, using subtle changes like switching out a single letter. Other times, they compromise the real account entirely. Either way, the result is the same: a message that appears completely legitimate.

With the fake identity in place and a convincing backstory ready, the attacker reaches out. The contact might come via email, but could also be followed up with a text message or phone call to add urgency. The message typically contains a request—perhaps to pay a fake invoice, share confidential files, or click on a seemingly harmless link. Basically, the message is crafted to appear routine, relying on trust and familiarity to lower the target’s guard.

By the time the target realizes something is off, the damage may already be done. Understanding this pattern of an impersonation attack reveals the tactics attackers use to exploit trust. Equipped with this insight, you can strengthen your defenses and effectively reduce risk by recognizing these patterns early before any damage occurs.

Impersonation plays a central role in several common cyberattack types. Recognizing these examples helps you understand where to focus your defenses.

Some common examples of impersonation attacks include:

• CEO Fraud: This attack involves criminals pretending to be a company’s CEO or another top executive. They take advantage of the authority and urgency associated with these roles to pressure employees to either release sensitive data or approve payments quickly, bypassing usual verification processes.

• Supply Chain Compromise: Attackers target an organization’s supply chain by phishing or compromising vendors and suppliers. By gaining access to a legitimate vendor account, they send authentic-looking payment requests or invoices, exploiting the trust between businesses to trick employees into making fraudulent payments without raising alarms.

• Account Takeover: In this scenario, attackers hijack an employee’s email or system access and use that account to impersonate them. Because the account is genuine, the impersonation appears credible, allowing attackers to request invoice payments, confidential files, or other sensitive actions from coworkers, increasing the likelihood of success.

These examples show how attackers take advantage of trust within your organization and with outside partners. Knowing how they work helps you build stronger defenses to protect your team, processes, and suppliers from losing money or sensitive information.

Email is the primary delivery method of impersonation attacks, so organizations need email security that can detect and prevent these impersonations. But legacy solutions like secure email gateways (SEGs) struggle with these threats, which is part of the reason why they’re growing in frequency and severity.

An impersonation email often doesn’t contain the known red flags that secure email gateways scan for, like malicious attachments and suspicious URLs. While those are important to prevent, they aren’t cornerstones of an impersonation track. In addition to the lack of attachments, impersonation emails often appear normal. They come from familiar names, or they can be just plain text. Sometimes these emails also come from real accounts if an attacker has taken control of those accounts, making them difficult to spot.

To begin with, effective email security should focus on understanding staff impersonation risks. For example, when an email from a trusted coworker arrives with a request that feels off, like unusual requests coming at an odd hour or from an unfamiliar geographical location, the system should pick up the clue.

A robust email security system also needs to analyze the tone and language of emails. Messages demanding time-sensitive action, asking for the company’s confidential information, or requesting invoice payments require extra attention and security measures.

Detecting compromised vendor accounts is another critical step. What if a trusted partner falls for a phishing attack, without your users being in the know? This can be one of the loopholes that lead to attackers impersonating suppliers. Advanced security tools watch for odd behavior like changes in payment details or unusual invoice patterns.

Preventing impersonation attacks means using smarter email security that understands the full context of each message, not just the obvious signs. Recognizing the signs of a cyber impostor early helps protect your team and stop fraud before it happens.

Impersonation attacks trick employees into authorizing payments or sharing sensitive data by posing as trusted contacts. These sophisticated scams bypass traditional email defenses by mimicking legitimate messages from real accounts. Abnormal’s AI-driven platform uses advanced behavioral analysis to detect subtle signs and block attacks before they reach your inbox. Protect your organization and stay ahead of evolving threats.

Book a demo with Abnormal today.