Email is one of the most essential tools for business communication. 90% of cyberattacks begin with a malicious email, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). This staggering statistic highlights the importance of cybersecurity awareness. Cybercrime, costing over $4.1 billion in 2020, particularly exposes organizations to major threats such as Phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and Email Fraud and ultimately, leading to huge financial losses and corporate reputation damage.
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Types of Security Email Threats
Phishing
Phishing is a cybercrime where the attacker pretends to be a trustworthy entity to steal sensitive information.
Spear Phishing: Targets an individual with a tailored message. For example, using information derived from social media, an attacker could easily send out a very plausible request “from” a colleague.
Source: Norton
Whaling: The cons target C-level executives (“big fish”) with high value and at stake, such jsonwebtoken as their role and title, using emails that are very important critical business emails.
Clone Phishing: In this, an email is created with an attachment or a link usually containing “malicious” “content” that is almost “identical” to an “already” existing, legitimate email. For example, remailing a company-wide email with “the”.
Source: MSP 360
Business Email Compromise
This is a sophisticated fraud focusing on companies that perform wire transfer operations and foreign suppliers.
CEO Fraud: This is the type of fraud where the criminal impersonating the CEO sends out an email to the employees to transfer money urgently, most times to a supposedly confidential deal.
False Invoicing Scheme: This is when fraudsters pretend to be real suppliers and request fund transfers for the invoices to a new account.
Attorney Impersonation: Perpetrators pretend to be lawyers or legal advisors during those sensitive transactions, insisting on quick, confidential payments.
Email fraud is a broad term for schemes that deceive victims for personal gain via email, and is distinct in several ways:
Identity Theft: Stealing someone’s personal data, which normally comes to one’s e-mail, to access the person’s financial resources or other sensitive areas.
Financial Fraud: Through direct solicitation of funds by emailing and using deceptive e-mails, for instance, fake charity donations or investment opportunities.
False Contracts: Misleads either a person or a company into signing a fake contract, which may include non-existent services or products.
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Best Practices for Email Security
Technical Controls
Strong technical controls are the base and principal wall of defense that ensure our email activities are secure and legitimate.
Authentication Protocols
Email Authentication involves some very important protocols that must be observed to ensure the identity of the sender and secure the entire communication done through emails.
Sender Policy Framework: This compares the sender’s IP against a list of approved IPs from that domain, hence the validation of the e-mail.
DomainKeys Identified Mail: This uses a cryptographic signature to trick mail servers that the domain owner sends and authorizes the email.
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance: This is a combination of the SPF and DKIM authentication that verifies and reports the validity of a suspicious email.
Leverage TDMARC: Begin by utilizing a Threat Detection, Reporting, and Conformance (Threatcop DMARC) solution. TDMARC simplifies the implementation and management of email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
SetUp SPF: Set up, in your DNS setup, a record of an SPF entry listing all the authorized mail servers.
Implement DKIM: Create a unique DKIM key pair and publish the public key in your DNS records.
Configure DMARC: Generate the DMARC policy for the DNS records to let the receivers know how to handle unauthenticated emails.
Test our SPF and DKIM: Validate the SPF and DKIM records with a test for the functionality of the available testing tools.
Monitor DMARC Reports: You receive DMARC reports, and you can monitor them for any unauthorized use of your email and its overall performance.
Make Adjustments: Update your records from time to time based on organizational changes and practices for sending emails.
Educate the Stakeholders: Make sure every person involved is enlightened on these protocols and their importance in the security framework for your organization.
Secure Email Gateway
A secure email gateway is a filtering tool for business email systems that monitors emails to stop unauthorized content or threats in both inbound and outbound mailboxes.
Threatcop Email Security Gateway: Safeguards inbound and outbound emails from malware, spam, phishing, and denial-of-service attacks. It employs filtering and encryption functionalities.
Email Protection: Recognized for protecting email systems from risks through advanced machine learning capabilities, that detect even subtle threats. It includes threat research to help stay ahead of potential attackers.
Configuration Tips
Update the virus and spam databases periodically.
Customize filtering rules to fit your organization’s needs.
Enable sandboxing to scan suspicious mail items or attachments.
Implement outbound filtering to prevent the leakage of sensitive content.
Regularly review and tighten gateway settings.
Human-Level Approaches
Use email to train staff and facilitate functional abilities to avoid security breaches.
Training and Education
Keep selected staff updated on fresh phishing strategies.
Employ banner tactics in a congregational metrics approach.
Simulate real-world attack scenarios.
Provide tests after educational units or sections to evaluate learning.
Display data probability and use simulations to test understanding and preparedness.
Advanced Defensive Strategies
Machine Learning and AI in Email Security
AI and ML are particularly good at identifying suspicious patterns and anomalies that could point to possible phishing or criminal activity:
Anomaly Detection – Identifying deviations from regular communication patterns, such as emails from a “CEO” late at night.
Link Analysis – AI compares presented links to known dangerous addresses to decide if the link is safe.
Behavioral Analysis: It analyzes your typical user behavior to look for deviations that might indicate a compromised account.
Content Scrutiny: AI has become good enough at reading human language to decide when content is malicious or deceptive.
Threat Intelligence Feeds: AI is hooked up to global security networks and will often know about a phishing attempt before you even open your email.
Incident Response Planning
A response plan is a safety net that you fall back on when something gets through. A strong plan will minimize the impact of a breach. This Threatcop Phishing Incident Response (TPIR) helps organizations with the following steps:
Immediate Isolation: If you have evidence of a threat, then it involves a plan to shut down the affected system to stop the spread.
Alert Protocols: A plan of action of who needs to be told what and how to spread information throughout the organization.
Analysis and Mitigation: Does your plan include instructions on how to find and close the source of the breach?
Recovery Procedures: If your email account is compromised, how can it be reset but without risking the reintroduction of the threat?
Post-Incident Review: And then, after the danger has passed, do you have a procedure to conduct a review to learn from and improve future responses.
Legal and Compliance Dimensions
Regulatory Frameworks
Two main regulations affecting email security practices are GDPR and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which set rigorous conditions for working with personal and health data. The GDPR obligation across the entire EU is to protect personnel and even sue individual authorities on the topic of the “right to be forgotten”. While, entities within the U.S. health sector have to protect health information according to the HIPPA, emphasizing patient’s rights to access and correct their medical record.
Data encryption: Emails containing sensitive data should be encrypted to protect against unauthorized access during transit and while at rest.
Regular audits: Continually control the safety and health of our current email systems for compliance and security vulnerabilities.
Access controls: Implement restricted access to data to limit people who can view and otherwise process sensitive data.
Data retention policies: Develop and enforce email data retention policies that control how long they are held and when they are securely destroyed.
Incident response: Create and constantly update incident response plans to have a proper, agile response to the detected data breaches.
Employee training: Having been informed, aware, and updated on legal laws and outright, employees must be trained to prevent Merry Christmas data losses.
Final Thoughts
As we have dissected the various layers of protection that back up our email system—technical, machine-learning, legal, informal—, there’s an old saying that springs to my mind: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” In our day there could not be a more appropriate expression, as our duty to look out is directly proportional to the security we wish to maintain. Therefore, learning and developing strategies go a long way.
