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For much of its existence, email has been the ideal method for expeditious and concise business communication. Memos and other interoffice communications evolved as businesses moved more online. In recent years, email has become a vital part of communication infrastructure worldwide. It’s quick, convenient, and simple…but it’s not as secure as most operations require.
Unfortunately, email is an easy way for scammers to transmit malware or target users with phishing attacks. Over 90% of the most successful attacks on businesses occur through this channel, and it’s not difficult to see why. Recovering from an attack can be a costly affair, both financially and reputationally. As most industries become more connected and take full advantage of using online spaces to conduct business, reconsidering email security and other cyber-security protocols are essential to continued operations. It all starts with your email system.
Here are a few reasons your organization may want to consider boosting their email security:
Prevent phishing attacks
While the frequency of phishing attacks varies by industry, at least 88% of all business organizations fell victim or became compromised by some kind of phishing attempt or successful attack in 2019 alone. In the worst scenarios, a successful phishing attack can lead to a breach. In the event of a breach, data —typically of the financial variety—becomes compromised or stolen. The stolen data often makes its way to online forums or other mercantile exchanges online. Because of this threat, it’s imperative to secure your organization’s email infrastructure. Layered protection detects threats and scams while reinforcing fraud protection. Downloadable documents get scanned for exploits and potentially fishy links before you have the chance to click on them.
Flexible and efficient BEC management
Protecting yourself from business email compromise (BEC) can be tricky. In a BEC situation, scammers pretend to be a trusted associate operating under the pretense of conducting legitimate business, but in reality, are attempting to scam the organization. BEC is hard to control due to the precisely targeted, low volume nature of the scam. Further complicating matters, these scams often aim at specific people. Stopping BEC scams rests squarely with a vigilant and pragmatic approach. Still, an email security solution uses machine learning to adapt and reinforce your efforts through investigating behavior and intention within messages. The security system has another valuable benefit: it can detect your organization’s employees’ writing style to help determine if a given email is legitimate or not. Reinforcing email security offers protection for both senders and recipients while creating more flexible management of higher-profile email contacts and resources.
Advanced threat detection
Phishing and BEC aren’t the only things with which email users should be concerned. Other threats—like ransomware, viruses, and zero-day exploits—can be transmitted to your system or network via email. Cyber threats like these can wreak havoc on anyone, any time, for any reason.
Here’s a quick breakdown of each threat and how it affects your systems:
- Ransomware — encrypts your data and holds it for ransom until the victim pays a certain amount of money to the attacker. Afterward, the data is released and decrypted.
- Virus/Malware — Viruses and malware find a way to propagate and infiltrate a device’s system, causing all manner of ill effects. They’re straightforward to pick up from a rogue link or drive-by download via email or websites.
- Phishing — This is an email designed to link legitimate. Phishing emails often contain a link requiring a user to input their credentials. Once the user has done so, their information becomes compromised.
- Zero-day exploit — Despite a somewhat confusing name, this type of attack happens within the same day or week following the discovery of a vulnerability in an operating system or piece of software.
Vigilance and basic common-sense security practices help, but this is where advanced threat protection enters the picture. The most apparent advantage of enhancing your email security is preventing these and other harmful issues from affecting your organization. Advanced protection analyzes an email’s authenticity and leverages that information to filter out spam, scams, and phishing attempts. Most importantly, it protects you from accidentally clicking a malicious link or URL within an email, preventing issues right at the source.
Multiple defense techniques
Using a robust email security service is the ideal method for securing your digital communications. Through multiple defense techniques like machine learning and exploit detection, the software filters out malware while learning how to determine if the header and content of an email are dangerous. Sandbox analysis helps detects issues with files or embedded links. With each of these in place, a robust email defense system largely automates security, providing a seamless end-user experience while simultaneously enriching industry communication.
Smooth and secure workflow
Nothing is worse than interrupting an entire workday due to a security problem. Clicking on the wrong link can lead to disruptions, so protecting your email is vital to a smooth workflow. An email security suite takes care of it for you, whether it’s verifying and authenticating a source or using Data Loss Prevention templates to track, document, and safeguard sensitive information. Furthermore, a unique email continuity system allows you to continue using your email in the case of a problem. When used in conjunction with many other benefits, it ultimately creates an extremely secure email system that will serve all your organization’s present and future communication needs.
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