• Sublime Core Feed
Medium Severity

Business Email Compromise (BEC) attempt with masked recipients and reply-to mismatch (unsolicited)

Labels

BEC/Fraud
Evasion
Free email provider
Header analysis
Sender analysis

Description

This rule detects unsolicited messages where the recipient matches the sender address and no other recipients are identified. The reply-to address does not match the sender, and is a freemail with no links in the body. This a common combination of techniques used by low level BEC threats.

References

No references.

Sublime Security
Created Aug 17th, 2023 • Last updated Jul 16th, 2025
Feed Source
Sublime Core Feed
Source
GitHub
type.inbound
and any(recipients.to, .email.email == sender.email.email)
and length(recipients.cc) == 0
and length(recipients.bcc) == 0
and length(body.links) == 0
and any(headers.reply_to,
        .email.domain.domain in $free_email_providers
        and not .email.domain.domain == sender.email.domain.domain
)
and (
  not profile.by_sender().solicited
  or (
    profile.by_sender().any_messages_malicious_or_spam
    and not profile.by_sender().any_messages_benign
  )
)
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