Email is a very popular channel for business communication. Large troves of valuable and often important information are sent via email. However, email is not only a popular communication channel and a tool for work data exchange. Email services pose large amount of threats to business processes and are very often used for conducting cyber crimes as well.
Let’s have a closer look at typical email security threats.
Typical email threats and how to counter them
There is a number of different security threats, referring to email services usage, we will focus on some of the most typical ones:
Most successful and efficient attacks are usually conducted when a few methods are implemented at once.
Domain spoofing
This technique is used for tricking users in order to make him/her believe that, an email or a phishing site is legitimate, while it is not actually. In order to achieve their aim, intruders fake a website name or email domain.
Malware and ransomware distribution
Emails often contain some links or files. Of course, it is typical if an employee receives some work document sent by a colleague or counterparty, for example. However, quite often such links or attachments do not refer to work tasks and pose a great risk to users and organizations. Interaction with malicious files and following suspicious links may result into infection of a PC or even the whole infrastructure. Malware harms computers or networks and include, but is not limited to:
Ransomware, in turn, is a kind of malware which blocks access to data and encrypts it. If a user wants to get the data back, he or she is forced to pay a ransomware.
Phishing
One of the most wide-spread security threat is phishing. Phishing has a lot of various forms, however, its main aim is to trick a user and make him/her to take some action.
There are large-scale phishing campaigns which distribute relatively generic phishing emails to a large number of potential targets.
Another typical form of phishing is spear phishing, when individuals are very specifically targeted. This makes it much more difficult to defend against such kind of attack. Spear phishing emails are well-prepared in order to convince the victim that the message is legitimate. Such attacks’ targets quite often turn out to be high-profile users, chosen by intruders due to their job position, especially if their responsibilities also entitles them to conduct payments in any form.
It is worth noticing that a lot of phishing emails can be intercepted by appropriate monitoring systems, as they significantly mitigate the risk of security threats.
Recently, such functionality was added to the SearchInform DLP .
You may book a free 30-day trial here. However, it is of crucial importance that employees stay aware in security related issues. Organizing theoretical lessons, practical seminars, occasional phishing attack simulations, as well as implementation of specific training courses should help.
SearchInform uses four types of cookies as described below. You can decide which categories of cookies you wish to accept to improve your experience on our website. To learn more about the cookies we use on our site, please read our Cookie Policy.
Always active. These cookies are essential to our website working effectively.
Cookies does not collect personal information. You can disable the cookie files
record
on the Internet Settings tab in your browser.
These cookies allow SearchInform to provide enhanced functionality and personalization, such as remembering the language you choose to interact with the website.
These cookies enable SearchInform to understand what information is the most valuable to you, so we can improve our services and website.
These cookies are created by other resources to allow our website to embed content from other websites, for example, images, ads, and text.
Please enable Functional Cookies
You have disabled the Functional Cookies.
To complete the form and get in touch with us, you need to enable Functional Cookies.
Otherwise the form cannot be sent to us.
Subscribe to our newsletter and receive a bright and useful tutorial Explaining Information Security in 4 steps!
Subscribe to our newsletter and receive case studies in comics!