Email turns 50 years old this year, and it seems as though analysts having been predicting the technology’s impending demise for at least half that time. Instead, it continues to be the de facto standard for business communication with upwards of 300 billion messages sent and received every single day.
Despite its popularity — or, more likely, because of it — email is also the leading delivery mechanism for a variety of cybersecurity threats. According to the Verizon Data Breach Incident Report, 94 percent of malware is spread via email, and email-borne phishing attacks account for 80 percent of social engineering attacks.
The need for a robust email security solution has become imperative in the past year. Security analysts and law enforcement officials warn that pandemic-related email scams continue to target remote workers. Most involve spoofed emails designed to trick recipients into clicking on attachments with malicious payloads.
Many organizations address the issue with email security solutions designed to identify known threats by comparing emails against databases of blacklisted URLs and flagged keywords. Anything matching those characteristics is blocked or quarantined before it reaches an inbox. However, that is not sufficient for combatting today’s more advanced and targeted attacks.
A New Approach
We have been steering our customers to AppRiver’s new Advanced Email Threat Protection solution. It is driven by a multilayer filtering engine that delivers significant improvements in threat identification by placing increased emphasis on email content instead of just the source of the email.
In addition to standard IP address and URL filters, AppRiver’s engine targets phrases, patterns and malware. Phrase filters look for complete phrases instead of just keywords to precisely identify ransomware, phishing, impersonation, malware and spam messages. The customized pattern filters help identify and block specific attack campaigns, while malware filters identify both known and zero-day attacks. In addition, re-filtering technology allows additional analysis of questionable emails.
Here are some of the solution’s other advanced capabilities:
Time-of-click analysis. This feature detects link-based malware and phishing attacks by analyzing the reputation of a URL at the moment the user clicks it, not just when the email arrives. This helps protect users against threats that use dynamic links that would redirect them to a malicious site.
Attachment inspection. Email attachments undergo forensic analysis in a secure, cloud-based sandbox environment. It can deliver a “disarmed” version of attached files by removing macros or converting files to PDF. This keeps potentially harmful files isolated from critical system software, avoiding the spread of malware.
Link protection. In addition to time-of-click analysis on the destination address, all links are rewritten to safe versions. Link rewriting involves encoding URLs so that users are redirected to AppRiver’s servers for additional analysis to determine if the original link is malicious.
Message retraction. This feature for Microsoft 365 gives organizations the ability to retract malicious emails already delivered to users’ inboxes through a simple web interface. This minimizes risk by taking malicious email out of users’ hands. In addition, the web interface allows administrators to review analytics and examine a full audit trail.
After five decades, email continues to be a valuable business tool because it is easy to use and it gets the job done. However, organizations must implement advanced threat protection to ensure this valuable communication channel does not compromise security. As long as users continue to view suspicious emails, open dubious attachments and click on questionable links, email will remain vulnerable to a wide range of cyberattacks
Contact us to discuss how AppRiver’s Advanced Email Threat Protection can play an important role in your email security strategy.
