The Low Hanging Fruit of Cyber Security Part 2 of 3: Advanced Email Security

This three-part series will highlight areas that are easy for Thrive to implement to help keep your business protected from outside threats.  If you missed Part One: Patch, Patch, Patch, we covered the importance of patching your environment to prevent potential disruption or even disaster. This installment, Part Two, will focus on advanced email security; how it developed and why you should ensure to use it in your businesses. Moving forward, Part Three will use this information and detail the proper measures to take when it comes to security awareness training.

Since the early 1990’s communicating via email has been an integral part of business communication.  Very quickly after the mass adoption of email as a primary communication medium, the bad guys figured out that email was a very efficient way to distribute their “dirty” payloads.  Email by itself is very insecure, nothing about how it was initially designed was approached with security in mind.  Anti-Virus software manufacturers began to capitalize on this by creating anti-virus products for email servers which blocked viruses in emails.  After these email anti-virus manufacturers tackled protecting us from viruses, some of the adversaries made a quick pivot and started sending “garbage”, which we know as “Spam”.  The volume at which spam was being delivered was like nothing anyone had ever seen.  Soon the amount of junk email that was being received caused the average business user to waste multiple minutes per day sifting through their inbox to find legitimate emails.  At that point some of the email anti-virus makers started to incorporate anti-spam capabilities into their products.  The best products were now scanning massive amounts of spam and virus traffic before these items ever made it to the servers, in turn saving users time to focus on their authentic emails.  For many years these third-party services, and in some cases email providers, offered a sufficient level of protection for businesses.

Have you noticed an increase in the number of emails that are getting to your email inbox?  Are they from valid sources?  If not, there is a high likelihood that some of these emails may contain a payload that could be very dangerous to the user and the business.  Even if the increase is from valid sources, you need to ensure that you are utilizing the best email protection possible.  With every step we take against intruders affecting our environments, they always seem to be a step ahead.  While spam and viruses are well and alive, the bad guys have again pivoted and are trying to get your users credentials and in the worst cases, extort massive amounts of money from your business.

Please contact Thrive or call us at 866-205-2810 for more information on the managed options that are available to proactively protect your users and businesses from the malicious content that is still primarily coming in via email.  Be sure to check back for part 3 of this series where we will dig into how to best train your users on how to recognize what is legitimate and illegitimate in the emails they receive on a daily basis.