What is the Best Phishing Software for Your Business in 2024?

To safeguard your business from malicious emails and a phishing frenzy, it is crucial to identify vulnerabilities, assess potential risks, and choose suitable protective measures that align with your business requirements.

Trustifi, a global leader in email security, understands the challenge organizations face when dealing with realistic phishing emails.

Understanding the Threat of Phishing Attacks and How Tools Can Help.

Phishing is a cyber-attack where attackers try to trick users into doing something that benefits them. Users become tricked into clicking on a harmful link or downloading malware. Downloadable malware can cause damage to a user’s computer.

Typical phishing attacks often rely more on blagging and social engineering than technology. Humans can become easily manipulated when emotions are triggered, such as through emails exploiting empathy, fear, or anger.

Furthermore, advanced phishing attacks are more about exploiting users for financial, personal, or political reasons. Stopping phishing starts with organizations understanding their vulnerabilities and risks within their security product strategy.

• Are the people at risk of email phishing and social engineering attacks because the organization has a massive presence in social media or is featured often on the news cycle?
• Are the executives targeted because of their controversial statements, or do they not meet their financial goals, causing the stock to crash?

Organizations deploying threat response defensive email security tools powered by AI from Trustifi is the most critical first step in solving the email phishing problem. Security awareness training is another critical step in protecting users and organizations from next-generation email phishing attacks.

Why are Small Businesses Common Targets for Phishing?

According to the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), hackers will target small-to-medium (SMB) companies because of the apparent lack of resources within their internal security operations (SecOps) and IT operations teams. SMBs are cloud-centric or rely solely upon Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms to provide adequate cyber protection.

Hackers still target midsize to large enterprise organizations because the financial rewards are more lucrative. However, hackers know larger organizations invest in more cybersecurity resources, managed services, and multi-layers of protection.

SMBs, however, do provide a very lucrative opportunity for hackers. These organizations often connect to integrated supply chains and provide critical components to larger organizations. Many SMBs have a direct connection to an online supply chain platform like Blue Yonder to conduct their commerce. Hackers will use email phishing and social engineering to compromise users or groups within the SMB to gain access to the backend of a global supply chain platform. This access through the SMB network creates a vulnerable backdoor, placing the entire supply chain at risk.

What Types of Phishing Attacks Should Organizations Watch Out For?

Hackers and scammers have no shortage of email phishing attack methods. Each attack method focuses on a group, users, or an executive within the organization. Many of these attack methods organically grew off the success of previous campaigns. Some phishing campaigns result from a zero-day exploit opportunity created by users failing to patch their various applications, devices, and operation systems.

Spear Phishing Attack: This attack method focuses on an individual within an organization or a home user. The hacker will craft a clever message with information trolled from the victim’s social media content and other social engineering techniques.

Clone Phishing Attack: This attack method continues to be a massive challenge for the SecOps team to stop because portions embedded within the message were stolen from previous legitimate messages. Often, the message masquerades as a previously sent message seeking a reply. This attack technique will frequently bypass email security filters.

Whaling Phishing Attack: Similar to spear phishing, whaling is an attack method focusing on CEOs and boards of directors. Often, these messages will use clone phishing techniques and impersonation to trick these executives into approving fraudulent invoices, disclosing confidential information, or downloading attachments loaded with malware. Whaling attacks lead to a business email compromise (BEC) event.

Link Manipulation: Link manipulation is a known attack vector hackers use to exploit URLs by rewriting links to access hidden directors or files within public websites. Organizations often use URL rewrite to shed the URL leading to backend systems or databases. Hackers also use this rewrite to tricks to click on these links embedded within phishing emails.

Malware Distribution: Email phishing messages, especially those loaded with malicious links and weaponized attachments, become a formidable platform for hackers to distribute malware.

“36% of all data breaches involve phishing.”

Hackers use email phishing as their preferred method to propagate malware because of the continued high success rate of their various campaigns. Users continue to click on email phishing messages at an alarming rate. Specific to spear phishing, the average campaign in 2023 results in 53% of the users clicking through.

How Anti-Phishing Software Protects Your Business?

Anti-phishing tools monitor all inbound emails directed to the cloud-based instance. Market-leading email security platforms like Trustifi use multiple filters to spot lookalike domains, known fraudulent email addresses, malicious links embedded within the message, and possible weaponized email attachments.

Legacy secure email gateway (SEG) uses static signature lists and first-generation behavior anomaly engines to detect email phishing attacks. Once hackers identify one of their various campaigns blocked by a SEG device, they will adjust their email phishing content and resend it. This near-time change had some success in bypassing these security filters.

Trustifi’s investment in artificial intelligence embedded within its inbound filter proved effective against hackers altering their phishing campaigns. Using AI for several years, Trustifi’s extensive processing of attack telemetry created a mature and multiple-layer filtering capability to drop even complex hacker AI-enabled phishing.

Organizations are phasing out their legacy SEGs for advanced AI-based solutions from Trustifi, witnessing immediate positive results in preventing next-generation email phishing attacks from reaching their users.

What are the Top Considerations When Choosing Anti-Phishing Protection?

Implementing phishing prevention starts with the organization evaluating its current strategy and capabilities. Investing in phishing protection isn’t about deploying one solution or a single adaptive control. Preventing phishing requires a cohesive plan with various layers of security, all working together to shut down several attack vectors simultaneously.

Organizations should look into a consolidated email security solution offering several layers of fully integrated protection, not solutions bundled with several management consoles.

The ideal email security platform to help prevent phishing should have the following capabilities:

• The platform should have AI-powered advanced inbound email phishing filters without dependencies on manual updates or legacy behavior analytics.
• The platform should have outbound data loss prevention and email encryption with organization-wide policies to protect against any successful phishing attack that attempts to exfiltrate data using a hacked email account.
• Monitoring of suspicious attacks is also a critical component in stopping email phishing. Organizations should evaluate the email security platform’s ability to capture and report suspicious activities before any email phishing campaign. These “early detection” reports help SecOps and IT operations gain visibility into ongoing exploits. This early detection could trigger a series of security automation remediation capabilities designed to stop a ransomware outbreak from propagating further into the organization’s network.

What are the Top Anti-Phishing Tools?

The email security marketplace has various legacy companies, startups, and established providers. Most security providers offer similar features and pricing options and often sell into identical marketplaces. Here is a breakdown of the top anti-phishing tools available today:

Trustifi: Trustifi continues to receive several industry awards and 5-star peering reviews for their exceptional delivery of advanced AI-email inbound security with a consolidated and fully integrated cloud-based platform, including data loss prevention (DLP), one-click compliance enablement and easy-to-use email encryption. The company continues to succeed in the SMB and mid-enterprise marketplace, selling successfully in school districts, wineries, and food store chains.

Mimecast: A well-established email security firm, Mimecast continues to have great success selling across several market segments, from SMBs to global enterprise clients. The platform has email simulation capabilities to help train its users. Mimecast’s platform is constructed using several third-party integrations with other software providers. These third-party providers create timely features to help Mimecast clients avoid zero-day attacks. However, the dependency of three third-party providers poses a risk to their user community.

Avanan: This company designed its products to enhance security for enterprise businesses by implementing measures to prevent phishing emails from reaching inboxes across all communication channels. The company doesn’t advertise its solution as a prevention of all phishing. Spear phishing can originate from a compromised trusted source without a suspicious link. Therefore, Avanan recommends training all employees in phishing prevention to identify and prevent social engineering tactics.

Proofpoint: Build on several legacy modules, Proofpoint continues to dominate large enterprise and federal markets with its FedRamp certification. Over time, Proofpoint added its capabilities, including AI, DLP, and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) functions. Proofpoint’s adoption of AI and machine learning enabled better email phishing prevention capabilities for their clients.

Barracuda Sentinel: Barracuda Sentinel uses APIs to help clients defend against phishing and business email compromise (BEC). This solution recognizes the potential escalation of attacks after email compromise. Barracuda’s approach emphasizes minimizing additional harm post-phishing rather than solely focusing on prevention. Additionally, this solution offers domain protection and fraud prevention through their DMARC analysis and reporting service.

Measuring the Impact of Your Anti-Phishing Solutions.

In time, all security products cannot protect the users if the organization cannot keep up with security patches and enable new enhanced features. Organizations leveraging email phishing simulation capabilities to test several attack methods simultaneously are significant to validate your phishing software.

Simulated attacks help discover flaws and weaknesses in your phishing protection layer. Phishing simulation solutions help users prepare for potential future attacks. The data from these phishing mail simulations becomes used in training events across your organizations.

Along with leveraging simulation capabilities, organizations should hire third-party penetration testing firms to execute comprehensive white-hat and black-hat evaluations against their phishing software. These trained, ethical hackers use several techniques, including social engineering, sending malicious text and voicemail messages, and well-crafted suspicious emails. These simulated phishing attacks from ethical hackers help organizations identify critical areas in their phishing protection strategy they need to correct to reduce phishing threats.

How Do You Get Started with Anti-phishing Software for Your Business?

Organizations wanting to invest in phishing software should follow these steps before deciding:

• Assess your email security strategy.
• Determine if your current email phishing platform uses AI and ML capabilities.
• Use phishing simulation software to test your users to see if employee training needs to be added or enhanced.
• Evaluate your current email security platform capabilities and look for ways to consolidate the various adaptive controls to help simplify your operations for managing phishing software.
• Evaluate the top three vendors in the space that feature advanced AI email filtering, consolidating additional features with centralized management and offering a better ease-of-use experience to help your users access the new tools.
• Select the preferred vendor and begin implementing, preferably transparent to the user community.
• After initial inbound email filtering becomes enabled, migrate legacy DLP, email encryption, and archiving solutions into the new consolidated platform for anti-phishing solutions. This step will help reduce the cost of email security while reducing the complexity of management and operations.