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Advanced phishing: Protecting your data and your name

By 9th October 2017September 20th, 2019One Comment

Email has evolved into the primary communication tool used by companies. Every day more than 200 billion emails are exchanged worldwide. With this, email and network security have become extremely high on the IT agenda. Spam emails are no longer the major concern, but rather part of a more complex picture.

  • Inbound threats are becoming more targeted, personal and universal.
  • The potential for confidential company data to leak is great with harsh consequences on your business.

To combat this Dial a Nerd can build a solution that will deliver:

  • Threat defense on an advanced level
  • Data security
  • Easy to use and simple management

A growing threat landscape

With the growth of Cyber Crime, email phishing attempt have become extremely targeted and believable.

Threats are more organised

Highly skilled cybercriminals are forming businesses that have the primary purpose of creating malware, discover vulnerabilities, build software to install malware and distribute attacks.

Threats are more personal

There has been a significant increase in highly targeted phishing attempts. Criminals do this by going through social media to find information on victims and engineer spear-phishing emails. These very believable emails contain links or attachments designed to install some sort of malware on your PC and steal company data. According to the Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report spam email messages increased by 250%.

Threats are more Pervasive

Once upon a time, you could check text-based emails on a company firewall on one PC or laptop at the office. However, today employees access rich HTML messages on multiple devices from anywhere. HTML, unfortunately, opens the doors for attacks, whilst access via multiple devices creates new access points into your network.

Outbound email leakages

With defending your business against threats, you also need to pay attention to data security. Multiple emails are sent every day with highly sensitive company data, the probability of an outbound email leakage is great. The famous Gupta email leak this year is proof of the vulnerability of email security, however, that could have been deliberate.

July 2014, for example, the global investment banking firm Goldman Sachs Group warned customers of a data breach that occurred when an outside contractor emailed client data, including “highly confidential brokerage account information” to a stranger’s Gmail account by mistake; it is not known how many Goldman Sachs clients were affected by the breach.

In most countries, emails with personally identifiable information must be encrypted. If any unauthorized person receives unencrypted emails, the company is in breach of many acts which can cause them harm.

Compromised email accounts broadcast a virus by launching sudden outbound spam emails. This then leads to the organisation’s email domain being blacklisted for the safety of those who might open these spam emails.

The cost of Insufficient Protection

Due to the widespread and constantly growing malicious attack threat, one may think that their security solution is constantly updated. Unfortunately, new threats and viruses are created every day to appear as safe just so they can get into your network. The costs of one security breach then reverse any short-term savings gained from using inadequate and basic security protection.

100 banks in 30 countries lost millions of dollars – and possibly more due to costs related – when hackers used bots to send an email with malware to unsuspecting staff. When they opened the emails the hackers could control the bank’s systems with their credentials.

Outgoing mistakes can also damage your brand, trust and reputation. A rogue sender can impact a company’s ability to send emails to legitimate people. A Target Corp. data breach that has cost more than 162 million dollars was started via a phishing attack.

Challenges

Effective protection requires an infrastructure that is global and addresses the entire threat environment – as in, before, during and after the attack. The solution must be scalable, flexible, have encryption capabilities and must not burden the current network.

Dial a Nerd’s email security solution delivers advanced threat defense, data security, and simple management whilst lowering the cost of ownership.

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