When Business Email Compromise Starts Rewriting Reality

Business Email Compromise (BEC) operates on a familiar playbook. Threat actors breach a mailbox, silently monitor operations, map approval chains, and ultimately exploit that access to divert funds or exfiltrate sensitive assets.This dynamic is central to our analysis as we kick off a series around Rapid7's collaborative research with Zimbra; upcoming installments will explore technical details and broader findings based within the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Our investigation disrupted the traditional BEC model in unexpected ways. We uncovered over 50 vulnerabilities, and found that several allow attackers not just to observe environments, but to actively rewrite them by impersonating senders without credentials, controlling inbox visibility, and altering shared documents and calendars.Business Email Compromise in action: Digital abuse of trustNone of this is theoretical for Zimbra. But don’t take my word for it, just ask Russia. CISA keeps putting Zimbra bugs into the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and the last three years make the point on their own:CVE-2024-45519, command injection in the postjournal service, unauthenticated command execution. Proofpoint saw attacker…

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