Question 490
A finance assistant receives a request to change a supplier bank account from a domain with a one-character spelling difference. Company policy requires reporting suspected business email compromise before any payment record is altered. What evidence should be preserved in that report?
Explanation
Correct Answer
The original message preserves headers for transport and authentication analysis, while the lookalike domain, beneficiary-change text and payment reference link the email to the attempted business process. Those artifacts let analysts correlate the request with other mail, inspect SPF or DKIM results where available and determine whether any payment records were actually changed. Preserve the file through the approved reporting channel; do not assume the headers alone establish the attackers identity. This tests evidence handling, not merely the separate callback-verification safeguard.
Incorrect Answers
A display name is easily imitated and does not preserve the originating mail path or the precise requested change. Deleting the message would also discard evidence that investigators may need to identify similar attempts across the company. The incident report should keep the original communication and enough payment context to determine what was targeted. For this situation, the suspicious sender domain and affected beneficiary details are more probative than branding alone.
A cropped image may be convenient for triage, but it loses routing headers, domain spelling, reply addresses and other metadata that help distinguish impersonation from a genuine supplier request. It also may omit the beneficiary or payment identifier needed to check business impact. A full message can support a later forensic and finance review without altering the original. A screenshot can supplement that evidence; it should not be the only preserved artifact.
Attribution is an investigative conclusion, not something to invent in an initial report. A forged domain might involve a compromised supplier, a recently registered impostor or an unrelated intermediary. Calling one party the confirmed attacker without evidence could misdirect incident handling and leave the payment change unresolved. The accurate report should separate known artifacts, the suspected BEC pattern, and any open questions while the approved team investigates.






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