Understanding phishing: Account takeover

Account takeover (ATO) is one of the most dangerous phishing techniques today. When attackers compromise legitimate email accounts, they inherit trust, reputation and relationships — making malicious messages extremely difficult to detect.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn how account takeover fuels business email compromise (BEC), why traditional secure email gateways (SEGs) struggle to detect these attacks and how advanced detection techniques, such as stylometry and clustering, identify suspicious behavior before fraud occurs.

What you’ll learn

• Why account takeover is the hidden engine behind modern email fraud
• How credential harvesting leads to large-scale compromise
• The difference between first-party and third-party account takeover
• Why reputation-based filtering fails against real-account phishing
• How conversation hijacking enables wire fraud and payment diversion

How INKY uses sender profiling and machine learning to detect anomalies