Detect BEC Financial Theft — Fraudulent Wire/ACH Transfer Initiation via Mailbox Tampering and Invoice Fraud in IBM QRadar

This detection covers the final, financially damaging stage of a Business Email Compromise (BEC) intrusion: fraudulent wire or ACH transfer initiation (T1657 — Financial Theft) that follows mailbox rule tampering and invoice/payment-detail modification. Having already gained access to a mailbox (via phishing, OAuth token theft, or credential stuffing), the attacker creates hidden inbox rules that forward, redirect, or delete messages matching finance-related keywords so the victim never sees replies from the real vendor or their own finance team. The attacker then sends or intercepts an invoice, purchase order, or payroll email and modifies the banking details — swapping the legitimate account/routing number or IBAN for an attacker-controlled mule account — while adding urgency language ("process today", "do not call, I am in a meeting") to pressure the victim into skipping out-of-band verification. Groups such as Cosmic Lynx (Russian-speaking, CEO-fraud wire transfers averaging $1.27M) and SilverTerrier (West African vendor-invoice-swap BEC) follow this exact three-stage pattern: mailbox tampering, payment-detail modification, then transfer initiation. Because banking-portal telemetry is rarely centralized in a SIEM, this detection correlates the two upstream stages that ARE consistently observable in mail and identity telemetry — malicious inbox rule creation and financial-fraud-pattern email content — as the highest-fidelity proxy for an active wire fraud attempt, with escalation criteria pointing responders at the actual funds-transfer confirmation step.