As the coronavirus pandemic forces enterprises to reshape their strategies, remote is slowly becoming the new normal. Platforms once united under a single firewall have now turned into scattered endpoints, and coherent threat defenses have to cover more ground than ever. While security experts struggle to keep threats at bay, one thing is becoming clear: your data is not safe anymore!
As often happens during disruptive events, your most valuable assets are also the most vulnerable. The same goes for communication channels, where nothing is under more strain than the old, reliable e-mail.
From spear phishing, whaling and password theft to invoice fraud and man-in-the-middle attacks, e-mail is the target of some of the most vicious cyber threats. In fact, a great portion of malware is spread by e-mail, including ransomware, keyloggers and malicious links. Not to mention more insidious threats like directory harvesting and data exfiltration.
The reasons for these vulnerabilities are simple. E-mail is a critical business tool and a vital communication channel - it’s faster and more personal than collaborative tools and more formal than chat programs. In other words, it’s the most targeted form of communication because it is, by far, the most used one.
A second reason would be that e-mail is cloud stored and remotely managed, but manually operated. The human element of a system is constantly involved in the process of sending and receiving messages, as well as in accessing the content within.
A third and final reason is that e-mail allows you to exchange just about everything, from vital business documents, to office anecdotes and video call invitations. Its simplicity and versatility mean that threats can go unnoticed. Furthermore, e-mail servers are an incredibly valuable and vulnerable source of company data and personal information.
All this makes e-mail security a top priority for companies worldwide. In fact, a recent Mimecast study reveals that 61% of organizations believe it’s likely or inevitable they will suffer a negative business impact from e-mail attacks, while 67% of them claim they’ve seen increases in e-mail related attacks. No less than 94% of organizations had experienced a phishing attack in the past and 88% had experienced e-mail spoofing!
The same study revealed data loss to be the main consequence of successful attacks, closely followed by direct financial losses. In fact, according to CSO Online, losses in 2019 alone might have reached 16 billion dollars. Aside from money, companies reported loss of customers and jobs and, inevitably, severe loss in reputation. Not to mention the downtime that closely follows most breaches.
And the worst part? Most of these statistics were published in late 2019, before the current crisis, and before a new flood of cyber security challenges. This is why many companies partner with e-mail security providers or even develop their own solutions.
E-mail security solutions work by filtering inbound and outbound traffic and by blocking malicious content before it reaches its recipients. An effective solution is not just a spam or suspicious link filter, but a framework of interlocked technologies.
Whether it’s an internally developed solution or an external one, an e-mail security platform should constantly block and quarantine suspicious elements and be connected to timely and relevant threat intelligence. So, assuming you want to create such a product or improve an existing one, there are a few challenges you should overcome.
First, before you start integrating more complex technologies, you should be certain that you’ve gotten the basics right. In other words:
After you’re done with these initial, but vital points, you should lean a bit into the deeper issues of e-mail security.
While all of the above translate into elevated e-mail security and a clear competitive advantage, they also mean a lot of dedicated R&D resources and high costs. So, what should you do?
Bitdefender is supported by almost two decades of experience, countless awards and the intelligence of over 500 million systems. But what makes us unique is that we have built more than a wide selection of solutions (over 20+ different SDKs); we have built a security ecosystem.
Our products work continuously on four levels: threat prevention, advanced detection, protection and investigation. Choosing our e-mail security technology will protect you from existing threats, and safeguard you from future ones.
So, if you’re looking to build a superior e-mail security solution or simply toughen your defenses, we can offer you advanced prevention with our award-winning Antispam SDK: A cloud-based technology that relies on a combination of antispam filtering and predictive technologies to effectively detect spam messages in any language and reduce false positives, as well as protect from phishing attacks or malicious links in email attachments. E-mail threats will be blocked before they reach your systems.
Bitdefender’s Intelligent Antispam technology is also used by Bitdefender Security for Mail Servers, which is the only antispam solution to have achieved VBSpam certification in all 50 Virus Bulletin spam tests ever performed.
To learn more about Bitdefender Antispam technology read the Antispam SDK Datasheet.
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Angel is a Senior Product Manager at Bitdefender overseeing the Bitdefender Advanced Threat Intelligence solution. As a strong advocate for open source standards, interoperability and ease of use, his main goal is to shape a product that best meets the customer needs. Outside business hours, Angel enjoys riding his mountain bike on the trails around Transylvania hills.
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