Can small businesses reduce losses from Business Email Compromises?
Business Email Compromise attacks cost organizations $2.77 billion in 2024. Learn how small businesses can protect themselves with AI-powered email security that doesn't require enterprise budgets.
It starts with an email that looks completely legitimate.
Your accounts manager receives a message from a trusted supplier. Same logo, same signature block, same friendly tone: "We've updated our banking details," the email says. "Please use these new account details for the upcoming, and future payments. Invoice re-attached for your reference."
The accounts team follow the process: they call the phone number on the invoice, validate the invoice. With a signoff from the head of accounting, the invoice is processed, and funds are paid to the new account number.
A month later, the supplier sends a 30-day reminder for payment. Although you followed the process, you realize the phone number was a diversion, the account number was not for your vendor, and $47,000 has been withdrawn into a crypto account. There's no getting it back.
This really happened! Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks like this one cost organizations $2.77 billion in 2024 alone, according to FBI data, and small businesses bear the brunt: 94% of SMBs faced at least one cyberattack last year, up from 73% the year before. Perhaps most alarming, 60% of small businesses that suffer a significant breach close their doors within six months.
The threat isn't going away. It's accelerating.
Why small businesses are prime targets
"But we have an email security gateway, which traps 99% of spam emails?" - Attackers need to be lucky just once, your gateways need to be lucky 100% of the time - no vendor will guarantee that!
There's a reason cybercriminals have expanded their focus from Fortune 500 companies to include Main Street businesses. Large enterprises tend to have dedicated security teams, multi-million dollar budgets, and layers of protection and controls. Small businesses often have limited controls.
The math is simple for attackers: why spend weeks trying to crack a corporate fortress when you can hit dozens of smaller targets with weaker defenses? Businesses with fewer than 100 employees receive 350% more social engineering attacks than larger companies and in over two-thirds of these attempts, the attack succeeds because someone did not spot the subtle threat.
This creates an uncomfortable reality: your business needs enterprise-grade protection, but you can't afford enterprise-grade prices or complexity.
What Ṣọ Email Security actually does
What if you are able to see a color coded email with real text and wordings telling you "this is fraud", would that be better than a warning icon? Would that be better than an "external" tag?
What happens when an email lands in a Ṣọ-protected inbox?
The AI-powered security engine analyzes the message in real time, checking for the subtle changes that humans often miss: Is the sender's domain slightly misspelled? Does the email create artificial urgency? Are there hidden redirects in the links? Does the writing style match previous messages from this sender? Are there changes in the content of attached documents?
If there's a deviation from the norm, the email is immediately color coded to indicate a security risk, and a detailed advisory is added to the top of the email.
Links are scanned before you click them. Attachments are checked before you open them, and for BEC attacks specifically, you can compare invoices and payment requests against previous legitimate communications to flag discrepancies such as phone number changes, and bank account changes like in the incident above.
Getting started
Ṣọ works as a browser extension that integrates directly with corporate/personal Gmail and Outlook. There's no complex installation, no server configuration, no learning curve. You install it and it starts protecting you immediately. Setup takes about two minutes:
- Install the Ṣọ extension from the Chrome Web Store
- Connect your Gmail or Outlook account
- Start working with protection active
There's no configuration required. No settings to optimize. No IT support needed.
Your inbox looks exactly the same, but now there's a personalized AI powered security engine watching for threats that would otherwise slip past you.
What this costs (and doesn't cost)
Traditional enterprise email security solutions can run thousands of dollars per month and require dedicated staff to manage. That's not realistic for most small businesses.
Ṣọ offers a different model:
- Free 7-day trial - full functionality, no credit card required
- Premium plan - $4.99 per month for individual users
- Teams plan - $3.99 per user per month for organizations
That's roughly the cost of a single coffee per week to protect your business from threats that could cost you everything.
Check our website for other pricing details - https://soemailsecurity.com/pricing
The protection you get
Beyond the core AI threat detection, Ṣọ provides:
Sender validation - verifies that emails actually come from who they claim to be, checking authentication records and flagging spoofed addresses.
Link and attachment scanning - every link is analyzed for hidden redirects, malicious destinations, and known threat signatures. Attachments are checked before they can cause harm.
Conversation hijack protection - monitors for signs that a legitimate email thread has been compromised by an attacker who's inserted themselves into the conversation.
Real-time alerts - you're notified immediately when something requires attention, not hours later in a digest email.
Advanced spam filtering - keep the noise out of your inbox so you can focus on legitimate communications.
Email Security Dashboard - bring email security to you by providing a personalized dashboard of all security threats received by your email address within a period.
Cyber attacks on small businesses aren't slowing down. Attackers are getting more sophisticated, using AI themselves to craft more convincing phishing emails and more elaborate BEC schemes. The question isn't whether your business will be targeted, it's whether you'll be protected when it happens.
A real scenario: the marketing agency that almost lost everything
Consider a 12-person marketing agency that handles social media and content for several mid-size clients. Their team exchanges hundreds of emails daily with clients, freelancers, and vendors.
One Monday morning, the office manager received an email that appeared to be from their largest client's CFO. The email referenced an actual ongoing project by name and asked for a rush payment to a "new contractor" to meet a deadline. The tone matched previous communications. The email even referenced a real conversation from the previous week.
With Ṣọ installed, the email was flagged before the office manager could act on it. The AI-powered detection engine detected that while the display name matched, the actual sending domain was a look-alike: the letter "l" had been replaced with the number "1." It also noticed the payment instructions were inconsistent with the client's usual patterns.
The office manager called the client directly. There was no new contractor. The CFO hadn't sent any email. A single browser extension had just prevented a five-figure loss.
Start your free 7-day trial of Ṣọ Email Security today. No credit card required. Full protection from day one.