More than 90% of cyberattacks start through email and traditional email security solutions are simply not up to the challenge. Mike Flouton, Vice President for Barracuda’s Email Security Business outlines how companies can get started with email gateway security to fend off the modern cybercriminal.
How is your business stopping cyberattacksOpens a new window designed to sneak through your secure email Opens a new window gateway?
In today’s rapidly evolving environment, traditional email security solutions aren’t enough to protect your business anymore. You must also effectively defend against sophisticated email threats that can bypass defensesOpens a new window , penetrate networks, and wreak havoc using backdoor techniques, including spoofing, social engineering, and fraud.
Depending on its nature, scope, and severity, a cyberattackOpens a new window can affect your business in many ways. According to the FBI, cybercrime costs $3.5 billion in losses in 2019 alone. (That doesn’t include unreported losses, which are significant.) There can also be a variety of indirect and intangible costs from attacks, such as legal fees, regulatory fines, operational disruptions, a damaged brand reputation, and other severe consequences.
While comprehensive email gateway defenses provide a solid foundation, using a multilayered protection strategy radically reduces susceptibility to email attacks and helps better defend your business, data, and people.
Learn More: How to Secure Your Employees’ Remote Email in 3 StepsOpens a new window
Defend Against Targeted, Complex Attacks The email and phishing threatsOpens a new window faced by organizations today vary greatly in complexity, volume, and the impact they have on businesses and their employees. Some of these attacks are used in conjunction with others; hackers often combine various techniques. For example, many spam messages include phishing URLs, and it’s not uncommon to see a compromised account be used in internal or lateral wire fraud.
The more complex an email attack is, the harder it is to stop. While email gateways are able to block most malicious messages, including spam, large-scale phishing attacks, malware, viruses, and zero-day attacks, they are no longer enough to protect against evolving cybersecurity threats. To protect your organization from the most complex attacks, you need an additional layer of defense—beyond the gateway and at the inbox level. API-based inbox defense, which uses artificial intelligenceOpens a new window (AI) and machine learning (ML), closes the gaps in your email gateway and helps provide total email protection against attacks.
Learn More: 4 Pillars of AI-Based Email SecurityOpens a new window
Boost Your Security Posture with API-based Inbox Defense
Gateways still provide the necessary foundation of email security Opens a new window and many allow for granular customization and policy settings to block targeted attacks. But gateways fall short of protecting your organization from highly-targeted, complex email attacks that use social-engineering tactics, including spear-phishing and business email compromise.
Gateways look for signs of malicious content or senders, but they let through attacks that don’t trigger any of their predetermined policies, filters, or authentication rules. While each classifier could potentially be turned into a rule or policy for the gateway, with hundreds of policies that need to be set up for thousands of employees, the solution doesn’t scale. It’s not adaptable to change, and it’s prone to a large number of false positives and negatives. Organizations relying on customized gateways to protect their users from spear-phishing attacks are only able to protect a select number of employees who have been identified as high risk. Inevitably, spear-phishing attacksOpens a new window will bypass the gateway and make it into users’ inboxes.
On the other hand, inbox defense relies on APIs integrated directly with your email environment, including individual inboxes. API integrationOpens a new window provides visibility into both historical and internal communication for every individual in the organization. Using the communication data and AI, an identity graph is built that reflects the typical communication patterns of each user. The identity graphs are based on which locations each employee is likely to log in from, their regular email addresses, individuals they communicate with, the type of requests they make, and hundreds of other signals. Based on each individual’s identity graph, when something atypical happens, AI flags it as potentially malicious and removes it from the user’s inbox before they can interact with the message.
Learn More: Know Your Enemy: 3 Types of Data BreachesOpens a new window
As email attacks have evolved to bypass traditional defenses, your business needs protection beyond the gateway, at the inbox, and with your employees. For email security to be completely effective, you must deploy the right combination of technology and training:
- Block High-volume Attacks at the Gateway
Gateways, the necessary foundation of email securityOpens a new window , block most malicious messages. If these spam, phishing, malware and zero-day attacks go unchecked, they wreak havoc inside your organization, impacting productivity and infecting machines.
- Protect your Users at the Inbox Level
Deploy API-basedOpens a new window inbox defense to unlock access to historical email communication and help protect your users at the inbox level from the highly-targeted, complex attacks that slip through the gateway.
- Educate Users on the Latest Threats
Guard against evolving, sophisticated, and complex phishing attacks, including those that use social-engineering tactics, with security awareness trainingOpens a new window for employees. With continuous simulation and training, employees are able to recognize and report malicious content, transforming them into a final layer of defense.
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