Five ways to strengthen email security - Barracuda

Article Barracuda Networks email protection SVP Asaf Cidon

Despite numerous attempts to dethrone it over the past few years, email continues to be the de facto for business communications.

In research published last year, The Radicati Group estimated that more than 281billion email messages were sent every day in 2018.

Email certainly isn't going anywhere in a hurry - which is music to the ears of cyber attackers.

Email is the number one threat vector facing organisations today, with new email-borne attacks grabbing the headlines on a regular basis.

Terms like ransomware, social engineering, phishing and trojans have now gained widespread recognition.

Unfortunately, secure email gateways are no longer sufficient to defend against today's level of attack as they bypass traditional security and end up costing organisations time, money, and brand equity.

Organisations need a defence posture that is able to detect and prevent attacks before they cause harm.

By following these five steps, businesses can improve email protection and ensure that they don't fall victim and suffer a loss.

1. Protect businesses from targeted email attacks

Modern attacks are rapidly growing in volume and sophistication.

With 91% of hacks starting with a targeted email attack, users need a solution that is able to detect and prevent attacks before they cause harm.

Users need to deploy a holistic email security solution designed to protect against spam, phishing, malware, ransomware, and other targeted email threats.

It needs to combine heuristic, behavioural, and sandboxing technologies to detect advanced, zero-day attacks.

2. Transform users from vulnerability into a robust defensive layer

Some attacks will get by IT security and land in users' inboxes.

What happens next depends on how well trained and aware the targeted user is.

Security training is absolutely integral to ensuring that employees aren't the weakest link in a business' security posture.

Security teams need to educate users to recognise even the most subtle of social engineering attacks to transform users from potential attack vectors into a layer of defence.

3. Prevent account takeover and social engineering attacks

Socially engineered spearphishing attacks are growing fast, with total losses estimated at more than $5 billion.

These highly targeted attacks are designed to impersonate a trusted third party to trick employees into disclosing valuable information or transferring funds directly to hackers.

By leveraging solutions that use artificial intelligence, each user's unique communication pattern is logged so any malicious intent and unusual activity is identified and flagged.

AI solutions can provide security teams with real-time defence against socially engineered attacks, account takeover, and other cyber fraud.

4. Build resiliency and mitigate compliance risk

You need data protection that boosts resiliency, minimises downtime, and simplifies recovery from ransomware and accidental data loss.

Compliance is at the forefront of many minds and this isn't showing any signs of changing.

So deploying a data protection solution that ensures compliance and business continuity in the face of an attack can give you peace of mind.

Options that offer advanced archiving and backup services further help to protect against accidental or malicious deletion of emails and data.

5. Automate incident response and get access to threat insights

Many organisations struggle with slow, manual, and inefficient email security incident response processes, which often results in attacks spreading even further.

When looking for a solution, security professionals need to choose one that automates incident response and provides remediation options to quickly and efficiently address attacks.

These solutions can easily send alerts, quarantine malicious emails, and use threat insights to stop the spread of malicious threats.