The Inevitable Relevance Of Cloud Spam Filters In Thwarting Email-Based Cyber Attacks
Understand how cloud spam filters offer useful, versatile, and compatible performance.
In recent years, spams and other unwanted commercial emails have been spreading across the internet, causing unwanted network and computing resource usage. To deal with these issues, organizations deploy SaaS-based online spam filtering solutions, which have minimal maintenance costs and are available on demand.
A cloud spam filter is primarily an email spam filter hosted on the cloud rather than a physical presence and is, therefore, one of the most affordable options. Such online spam filtering solutions act as inbound spam filtering to identify malicious messages and as an anti spam cloud solution for outbound messages.
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Why Are Online Spam Filtering Solutions Important?
Surveys and reports suggest that approximately 269 billion emails are transferred across the internet, and almost half of them are potentially suspicious emails or spams. Therefore, cloud spam filters are used by businesses to deal with spam and reduce the following consequences.
- Productivity loss includes identifying and quarantining spams, bandwidth loss, computing resource wastage, and storage costs.
- Through unidentified spam messages, malware infection can be done in the form of adware, spyware, or even from Trojan, worms, or toolkits.
- Ransomware that infects critical components of a network and attacker demands a ransom for restoring the systems to normal mode.
- Phishing emails that gain unauthorized access through spoofed websites or backdoors.
- Loss of reputation when attackers use an organization’s server to send spams to external networks, and the IP address of the business gets blacklisted.
Working Of An Email Spam Filter
The email spam filter works behind the central server that links the network with the internet and checks the header and content of inbound emails for suspicious materials or URLs and also ensures the mail originates from an authentic source; otherwise, the email will be sent to quarantine from where users can restore it if it was a genuine mail. Besides, outbound emails are also checked to avoid the IP address of the organization getting blacklisted.
Ways In Which Antispam Cloud Solutions Achieve Filtering
With the introduction of the cloud spam filter, the cybersecurity industry has been developing sophisticated spam filtering solutions that are dynamic and supported by the latest technologies. Online spam filtering services achieve spam filtering in the following ways.
- DNSBL, also known as Domain Name Server Blackhole List, compares the IP address of incoming emails and checks if it is from suspicious sources. If the mail originates from unauthentic resources, then the mail will be quarantined for manual checking; it will be directed to the user’s mailbox.
- SMTP controls perform tests on inbound emails such as checking the MX record of incoming email, search for digital signatures, and confirming MAIL FROM commands to authenticate the email source.
- URIBL and SURBL Filters that identify suspicious URLs that are linked to spoofed websites.
- A Content Analysis Tool assigns a spam score to incoming emails based on each email’s header and content. If a predefined tolerance limit is exceeded, then the messages will be tagged as spam.
- Recipient verification protocols check the recipient’s address of incoming emails to ensure the authenticity of the mailbox and then decide whether to quarantine the email.
What Is Inbound Spam Filtering?
In an email spam filter, inbound spam filtering refers to analyzing the content and the source of each email before directing it to the user’s mailbox. If the mail contains suspicious content, then it is quarantined, else sent to the user’s inbox, and this mechanism is known as inbound spam filtering.
Benefits Of Using A Online Spam Filtering Solutions
It is mainly because of the following advantages that organizations are now adopting dynamic cloud-based spam filters to fight cybercrimes online.
- Cloud spam filters offer a variety of control features to the administrator controlling. Such granular control mechanisms ensure versatility and facilitate ease of use of such methods. By using cloud filtering solutions, businesses can impose a higher threshold for particular departments to provide maximum protection.
- Antivirus scanning with the antispam cloud filtering ensures maximum probability of detecting malicious content and reduces the cost of storing antivirus solutions in individual systems.
- Outbound scanning for identifying malicious actors within an organization’s premises is as important as inbound scanning. Such a facility ensures that a business’s reputation is never compromised, and the IP address never gets blacklisted.
Choosing The Best Enterprise Spam Filter For Organizations
Choosing an appropriate cloud spam filter is a tedious task for organizations, and the best enterprise spam filter can be selected based on the following factors.
- Previous client testimonials
- Purchase and maintenance costs
- Industry experience of the provider
- Service compatibility with different operating systems
- Lower false-positive rate
- Antivirus solutions used
Factors Affecting Cloud Spam Filter Pricing
Generally, cloud spam filter pricing is a combination of three factors that decide the final price for clients. The elements are as given below and are variable according to market capitalization and other variables.
- IT operation costs involved in maintenance, administration, event management, and quarantine management.
- Productivity loss due to higher false-positive rate, quarantine report, user setting, and spam messages.
- Solutions cost involves the cost of selection, acquisition, configuration, and management of the solution.
The Future Of Cloud Spam Filter
The cybersecurity industry and internet enthusiasts have been trying to fight spam and malicious actors since the beginning of networking. The cloud spam filter solution as a consequence of such an experiment to make email communications safer and efficient. Not all spam filtering solutions are equal, and each service needs to be customized to meet each industry’s specific requirements. Experts estimate that the cyberattacks will hike in the coming years, and a foolproof cybersecurity framework is indispensable to fight cybercriminals and perform enough investigations to catch them with pieces of evidence.
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