Commentary: signature email security misses fraud from trusted accounts
Original title: The code and the court: Why your email security thinks like Napoleon
The essay cites Verizon’s 2026 report, with third parties in 48% of breaches, and FBI BEC losses above $3 billion.
A CSO Online essay argues that signature and anomaly-based email filters work like a fixed legal code: they confirm known patterns but accept messages from compromised vendors and real accounts. It says authentication can verify the sender while missing whether a payment or banking-change request should be believed. The piece urges readable, evidence-based judgments and human approval for wire, vendor-bank and payroll changes, without naming a product or incident.
Unconfirmed: This is an opinion analogy; the breach and loss figures are cited from other reports, not new measurements.
- Verizon’s 2026 DBIR is cited for third-party involvement in 48% of breaches, up 60% in a year.
- The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report is cited for BEC losses above $3 billion.
- The essay says high-stakes payment changes should escalate to the account owner.
From the original article
4 min read at csoonline.com
In 1804, Napoleon gave France a code that much of the world still runs on. The Code civil replaced a tangle of local customs with a single written statute: orderly and knowable. In that tradition, the judge’s job, in Montesquieu’s phrase, is to be the mouth of the law, nothing more.
csoonline.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.