Included in managed IT
Keep a fake invoice or spoofed wire request from ever reaching the person who approves payments. Email security catches phishing and business email compromise before your staff have to judge it.
Staff at a small financial office are not thinking about security when they open email. They are handling client messages, invoice approvals, insurance confirmations, and wire instructions. A spoofed vendor message built to look like any of those is easy to act on, and the cost is not a cleanup fee. It is a payment sent to the wrong account.
Business email compromise (BEC) is the specific version of this that hits financial offices. An attacker poses as a vendor or a client and asks to send a wire to a new account. If that request is honored, the firm is out the funds, and a wire is hard to claw back. Title offices and CPA firms see more of this because they move money on a normal day. Stopping the email up front is far cheaper than recovering a misdirected payment.
The same applies to your accounts. If stolen credentials let someone into a mailbox, they can read threads and add a quiet forwarding rule to watch for the next closing or payment. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC keep your domain from being spoofed, and MFA keeps a stolen password from being enough to get in. These are also the email controls a cyber insurer asks about, so having them in place helps you qualify for coverage and avoid a denied claim if you ever need it.
Filtering
A filtering layer in front of your inbox blocks known malicious senders, quarantines suspicious attachments, and flags links that lead to phishing pages. Most phishing attempts never reach your staff, so there is nothing for them to click.
DNS Records
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three DNS-level records that work together. SPF lists which servers are authorized to send email on your behalf. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to outbound mail. DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when messages fail those checks. Together they keep an attacker from spoofing your domain to send a fake invoice or payment request to your clients.
Configuration
Email accounts are configured with encryption in transit, MFA enforced, and auto-forwarding rules reviewed. A forwarding rule that sends all your email to an external address is how an attacker watches for the next wire and reroutes it, so we find and remove those rules.
Awareness
No filter catches everything. Staff need to know what a suspicious email looks like and who to call when they are not sure, especially before approving a payment or a change to wire instructions. I cover this during onboarding and reinforce it as new threats emerge.
The assessment reviews your current email configuration and identifies gaps. Email security is part of managed IT.
Get my free gap reportWritten by Hammad Arain, founder of Arain Systems. CCNA, CompTIA Security+, Microsoft AZ-104. Updated June 2026. Educational, not legal advice.