The New Face of Fraud in Financial Services with Greylock Partners and the SANS Institute

Business email compromise and social engineering have overtaken purely technical exploits as the biggest threat facing financial services firms—and AI is making the attacks faster, more targeted, and harder to spot. In this webinar, Mick Leach, Field CISO at Abnormal AI, and Manuel Bernal, VP of Technology at Greylock Partners, join the SANS Institute for a candid conversation on how fraud tactics have evolved inside financial services and venture capital. They walk through real incidents, including a compromised email account used to alter wire transfer instructions during an active transaction, and a recurring pattern of attackers targeting new hires the moment they update their LinkedIn profile. They explain why quarterly, one-size-fits-all phishing simulations miss the mark, and make the case for role-specific, event-driven security awareness training paired with a no-blame reporting culture. The conversation covers how attackers now chain multiple stages together, from reconnaissance and rapport-building to credential harvesting and fraudulent wire requests, into a single sustained campaign, and why pausing to verify through a different channel needs to become habit at every level, including the C-suite. Looking ahead, Mick and Manuel discuss how generative AI has compressed attacker reconnaissance from tens of hours down to under a minute, and what deepfake voice and video calls mean for verification processes going forward. They also share how security teams can use AI-native, behavior-baseline detection to defend at the same speed attackers now operate. 0:00 Welcome and speaker introductions 4:56 Evolving BEC attacker tactics 11:01 Real-world wire fraud incidents 16:21 New hire LinkedIn targeting risk 21:25 Why strong defenses still fail 26:29 Building a verify-before-acting culture 32:38 Vendor and third-party risk gaps 34:40 Reinventing security awareness training 42:43 Aligning security with the business 49:35 AI defense and emerging deepfake threats Follow @AbnormalAI for more expert insights on AI-powered email security, emerging threats, and the future of cyber defense. 🔗 Upcoming events: www.abnormal.ai/about/events 🔗 Learn more from Abnormal: www.abnormal.ai/resources 🔗 Learn more about all Abnormal products: www.abnormal.ai/products 🔗 Request a demo: www.abnormal.ai/demo #AbnormalAI #EmailSecurity #CyberSecurity #Webinar #BECAttacks #Phishing #WireFraud #FinancialServices #AIAttacks #Deepfakes