Email remains a critical asset to every business, but it’s also the easiest way for cyber criminals to attack your organisation. Additionally, with the rise of cloud-based email, phishing threats have only become more damaging and easier to implement.
85% of organisations have experienced a phishing attack and nearly 4% of those phishing attachments have been opened. Phishing emails and other malicious messages are designed to provide an attacker with initial access to an organisation’s network. This can occur in a variety of ways and achieve a number of different purposes:
- Credential Theft
- Fraudulent Payment: Business Email Compromise (BEC)
- Trojan Installation
- Ransomware Delivery
Because email is so common, so easily compromised, and so often attacked, email security is an essential component of cyber security.
What is Email Security?
An Email Security Gateway is a protection mechanism that stops volume-based and targeted cyber threats via email. This helps secure the dynamic enterprise attack surface, prevent the loss of sensitive data, and maintain regulatory compliance.
Secure email gateways scan emails for malware before forwarding them on to their destination. They help your organisation defend against email-based threats such as spam, phishing, malware, zero-day threats, impersonation, and Business Email Compromise attacks.
It’s important to note that best practice email security involves more than just a technical solution. All staff members need to remain alert for emails from suspicious or unknown destinations. As an organisation, it’s also important to undergo regular security awareness training on how to spot and avoid modern phishing attacks.
Why do you need Email Security?
Email is the number one attack vector in the world, meaning cyber criminals use it more than any other avenue as the first step to a cyber breach. That makes it an essential vulnerability to remediate if you want to improve your security posture.
An effective email security gateway will protect your sensitive information, scan for malware, prevent unauthorised access, and ensure peace of mind for employees when opening email attachments.
Phishing attacks are easy to deploy at massive scale — in fact, it’s estimated that cyber criminals send out 3 billion phishing attacks per day! That means absolutely all organisations will be targeted, no matter their size, reputation, income, industry, or status. Email security is therefore important for everyone, whether you’re a start-up, government agency, or global corporation.
What are the key components of Email Security?
In-built email security solutions are no longer sufficient by themselves to protect against modern phishing threats. Organisations require an email security solution with several core capabilities:
- Anti-Phishing
It’s essential that your email security solution has an anti-phishing component. Phishing remains the most common cyber attack in the world, with millions of employees falling victim to them every day. Your platform should be able to use domain name validation, anti-fraud, and email spoofing intelligence to protect against phishing.
- Malware Protection
Your email security gateway should integrate with an antivirus engine to identify and restrict messages that have dangerous attachments, links and URLs. Ultimately, an effective gateway needs to give your organisation confidence that your network won’t be compromised by viruses or malware.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a feature of powerful engines that prevents critical data from being stolen via email. This feature is customised to identify emails that convey sensitive or confidential data in your organisation. For instance, emails containing specific warning words or phrases may trigger your alert. Those emails can then be encrypted, blocked, or temporarily halted for an administrator’s approval.
- Account Takeover Prevention
Account takeover prevention stops cyber criminals from stealing your login details and assuming your online identity. By using your account, these cyber criminals can then send further phishing emails, change your account or organisational details, steal confidential information, or even funnel your organisation’s finances directly into their accounts. The account takeover prevention feature in your email security solution will identify suspicious activity on an email.
Why CT?
With best-in-class performance validated by independent testing firms, CT Secure Mail delivers advanced multi-layered protection against the full spectrum of email-borne threats and risk. Powered by threat intelligence and integrated into the CT Security Fabric, CT Secure Email helps your organisation prevent, detect, and respond to email-based threats such as spam, phishing, malware including zero-day threats, impersonation, and Business Email Compromise attacks.
Further complemented by an array of deployment options and operating modes for cloud-based, on-premises or hybrid email environments including fully managed solutions, CT Secure Email delivers comprehensive, proven email threat protection — all at an industry-leading cost to performance.