If You Think Phishing Is Only Your Employer’s Problem Think Again
If you work for a company, you probably think about phishing attacks in a distant sort of way. In other words, phishing may be a problem, but it’s not your problem, really. It’s your employers’. Right? Wrong.
Today we received an email to our Freshdesk support tool that that was an Amazon.com confirmation messages that contained download links to an infected Microsoft Word document.
There are 3.8 billion email accounts worldwide, and 281 billion emails were sent per day in 2018. Chances are, your business has contributed a bit to that number.
After a while, the accumulated emails can get unruly, not to mention become problematic as well. To solve those problems, you should consider email archiving.
Russia and its hackers have been popular in the news for the past several years. Whether to allegedly influence foreign elections or steal intellectual property its sphere of influence is worldwide.
But first a bit of history.
How did we get to this point in time? Countries have always been involved with clandestine activities to undermine or even overthrow neighboring governments. They have used deception and sometimes even force to accomplish their goals. So it was only a matter of time before technology was embraced as a tool to this end. And so began the partnership between hacker and government.
Spear phishing is when you receive an email from someone or some company you trust. It looks legitimate. It may even have the names and extension number of coworkers. It looks authentic, so you don’t give it a second thought. But you should, because it’s from an attacker, and they’re trying to steal your valuable information. Do you have reliable email phishing prevention security?
2018 was a good or bad year for phishing or phishing prevention depending on which side of the law you were on! Phishing is defined in many places on the internet, but I like the Cambridge Dictionary definition the best: “an attempt to trick someone into giving information over the internet or by email that would allow someone else to take money from them, for example by taking money out of their bank account”.
One of the things that we have noticed in the last few years is that the migration to the cloud has created a huge gap created by the migration to the cloud by Universities and Colleges. While Office 365 or Google Apps are attractive options of hosting current students and faculty and staff, they are not a good fit to handle the unique needs for alumni email forwarding.
In this age of rampant cyber attack, corporations must take measures to protect themselves. Since 91% of all cyber attacks begin with a phishing email, taking steps to defend against phishing attack might be the single most important aspect of an overall threat defense plan.
Despite the rise of tools like Slack, Skype or Jabber the reality is that nearly all business communication between companies is over email. When your mail server is compromised and goes offline, not only internal communications will be disrupted, but external ones as well. Sales inquiries, customer service requests, and important inter-business communication channels will be cut off, and inbound emails will bounce, causing potentially significant disruption and potential loss of revenue.
You may already know that Yahoo.com has a DMARC policy in place that prevents mail with yahoo.com in the from address from being delivered if it is sent from outside Yahoo’s infrastructure.
Yahoo is expanding this policy to their lower-volume Yahoo international domains below on Mar 28, 2016.
The list of domains that will become unusable is as follows:
We often write about preventing spam from getting into your mailbox, (as you know Spam Filtering is one of our most popular products), however we really don’t stop to talk about the problem of SMTP service providers inadvertently allowing their customers to send out what would be considered by the recipient to be SPAM or outbound spam protection.The tools, techniques, and mitigation required to defend an inbox are very well established and documented. But preventing authenticated, paying customers from abusing your network to send spam intentionally or because of a compromised system is an issue that we are attacking head-on.
By the time any business is aware that they are the target of a ransomware attack, it’s too late. Once a hacker has breached security and enticed a user to click on a malicious link or attachment, access to local data on that employee’s computer is locked. In order to unlock the data, a ransom must be paid. In about 91% of cases, the vector for ransomware is incoming email, often in the form of a spear phishing attack that purports to be from a sender known and trusted by the victim.
Spam is one of the most ubiquitous and costly annoyances to companies today. It clogs inboxes. It consumes storage space and bogs down email servers. And it consumes tremendous amounts of bandwidth with frivolous or dangerous messages and traffic. With the yearly increase in the volume of spam, finding the right spam blocking solution is vitally important to business, because without effective spam blocking, productivity can and will grind to a halt.
Ransomware is a violent and deadly form of attack that each year results in the loss of more than a billion dollars to corporations. Six out of every ten virus payloads were ransomware in 2017, with companies being subjected to this form of attack every 40 seconds, on average.
Spam is more than a nuisance — it is a scourge that, if unchecked will wreak havoc on an entire organization. In the best case, inboxes are flooded with oceans of superfluous email, and servers are overwhelmed. In the worst case, spam can be a vector for malicious attachments, malware and viruses.
We are making two new changes to the way that the email system processes mail in an attempt to cut down on spam. We are adding additional validations and checks to ensure that the domains mentioned in the SMTP envelope are valid and have a functional DNS record. (more…)
Each year, an increasing number of spam emails are sent to corporate employees, threatening to clog corporate email servers and slow productivity to a crawl. With the rising concern to business that spam has created, more organizations are turning to cloud-based spam filtering solutions to ameliorate the threat of disruption from spam.
Email threats come in a variety of forms. With over 90% of security threats beginning with some form of email attack, it is imperative that organizations educate their users on these forms of attack, get better email hosting and take steps to harden their networks against them. Three of the most commonly seen broad categories of email threat are Phishing, Ransomware, and Domain Name Spoofing.
Ransomware is a multi-million dollar a year online business that can strike any organization.
Both Ransomware and legitimate business engage in email marketing campaigns with the intent of making sales to new customers. In the case of legitimate business, some good or service of value is returned to the client. In the case of ransomware, business is slowed or halted by malware that locks or deletes files, and a ransom is demanded that may or may not stop the attack or reverse the damage if paid. Ransomware is criminalbut make no mistakes: its top producers make millions of dollars a year in revenue.
The number of ransomware attacks is increasing worldwide, which forces corporate IT teams to come up with innovative solutions to combat the threat.
But email based threats like ransomware are costly and difficult to fight with on-site solutions alone. With an on-site solution, by the time the existence of ransomware is known, the threat is already wreaking havoc across the network.
Once ransomware gains access to a company’s systems, it’s too late. In the best cases, only a few isolated computers are held hostage. But if shared network drives are present, the ransomware can propagate across entire corporate networks, quickly bringing the organization to its knees.