Email remains the most widely used business communication tool. It is also the most common vector for cyber threats.
IT teams focus a lot of attention on making email easy to access and use while preventing the most common email-borne attacks. Because human error is involved in up to 95 percent of security breaches, much of the attention is focused on preventing spam, phishing and other malicious emails from reaching users’ inboxes.
Organizations increasingly rely on Microsoft 365, both to eliminate the need to purchase, install and maintain software and to give remote workers access to essential productivity applications and collaboration tools. More than a million organizations have adopted M365, which has about 240 million active users.
There’s a lot to like about email. It’s fast, cheap, easy and reliable. With the touch of a button, you can simultaneously send messages or documents to dozens of contacts located just about anywhere on the planet. You can also use it to sort, file and filter important personal and professional information.
Email remains the most common business communication and collaboration tool, far outpacing phone, text and video usage. The average office worker now sends and receives approximately 140 business emails each day, and analysts say usage continues to grow by about 7 percent annually.
Fifty years after it was invented by an MIT engineer, email remains the world’s most popular business communication tool. Unfortunately, it is also the single greatest source of business data leakage.
A whopping 95 percent of IT leaders say that customer and company data is at risk on email, according to the 2021 Data Loss Prevention Report by the cybersecurity firm Egress.
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.
People have been finding ways to rip each other off for centuries — historians say the first documented case of financial fraud occurred in ancient Greece around 300 B.C. It is no surprise that fraudsters in 2020 are using the global pandemic to hoodwink victims on a massive scale.
Much like the coronavirus itself, virus-themed ransomware attacks are spreading relentlessly. However, there are several relatively simple steps you can take to flatten the curve of these malicious campaigns.
Cybercriminals commonly launch attacks designed to play on widespread fear and uncertainty during major world crises.
According to the FBI’s 2018 Internet Crime Report, the financial losses associated with Internet crime increased by 90.8 percent from 2017 to 2018. The highest losses came from business email compromise (BEC) and email account compromise scams, with 20,373 victims losing a total of $1.3 billion.
Email is perhaps the original “killer app,” an application so effective and easy to use that it sparked the rise of the personal computer and the spread of the Internet. Today it is the de facto standard for business communication with more than 4 billion email accounts worldwide generating nearly 200 billion messages every day.
