Email Phishing Attacks: A Wake-Up Call for Organizations

In a recent study by AAG, phishing attempts continue to be a global problem for every organization, government, and individual.

• “Phishing scams are the most common form of cybercrime, with about 3.4 billion spam emails sent daily.”
• “One whaling attack costs a business $47 million.”
• Statistics show that “83% of UK businesses that suffered a cyber attack in 2022 reported the attack type as spear phishing attacks.”

Source: AAG: The Latest 2023 Phishing Statistics (updated August 2023)

More emailing phishing and business email compromise(BEC) attacks occurred in the first quarter of 2023 than in any other timeframe in recent times.

Percentage of internet users in selected countries who have ever experienced any cybercrime in 2022.

Hackers, phishes, cyber criminals, and global terrorists recognize the ease and simplicity of sending billions of spam messages globally in minutes, knowing a portion of these will lead to a successful breach.

Cybersecurity Risk Created By Self-inflicting Actions.

Phishing schemes, including voice phishing and fraudulent emails, create potential victims in every organization.

CISOs and CIOs continue to communicate this risk of email attacks to other senior executives in hopes of gaining their support to address the problem by co-funding their cybersecurity prevention strategy.

The lack of needed funding continues to feed the risk. Yearly budgeting for IT and the rest of the organizational spending is a hard-fought reality. Many CFOs recognize the need to be secure across the entire enterprise. Yet, business units, including sales, marketing, product, and IT, fight over money.

Ultimately, the financial budget compromise leads to a security vulnerability.

Hackers, like investors, read company financial reports looking for any hint of corporate money problems, pending lawsuits, financial losses, or layoffs.

These early functional indicators create exploitable opportunities:

• Hackers will use social engineering to connect with disgruntled emails and look for ways to regain their previous employers through credential phishing, email account compromise, and clone phishing.

• Cybercriminals will attack external systems looking for unpatched systems.

• Phishers will use artificial intelligence to generate the perfect email phishing campaign against executives within the organization.

Knowing these attacks will happen, why do organizations maintain the status quo when modernizing their email security to address suspicious emails and common phishing scams?

Letting the Financial Decision Create the Greater Risk.

Often, organizations that continue to stay on legacy technology continue their own create risk.

Legacy systems and secure email gateways running out-of-date email filter solutions, if not supplemented with additional protection, may need help to block advanced malicious emails, attacks against login credentials, and social engineering attacks, resulting in unexpected financial losses. A successful phishing attack happens because of an organization not patching its devices, hosts, or adaptive control solutions.

Many organizations will partially keep legacy security devices in production because of the financial decision to align with the amortization schedule of the asset. This paradox creates more cybersecurity problems than more people release.

How often a CISO and CIO is told, “We still have three years left on that contract; we don’t have the budget to do the mid-term replacement.” Many publicly traded organizations are required to report their financial earnings every quarter. Hackers reading these reports know that cybersecurity funding will become cut if an organization has economic issues. This action motivates the hacker to increase their phishing messages, whaling email attacks against the CEO, and other forms of phishing to gain access to valuable corporate data.

How Can Companies Protect Themselves from a Phishing Attack?

Traditional thinking called for a defense-in-depth layer of physical devices, managed services, outsourcing, or relying on email service providers to incorporate security embedded within their offerings. Security awareness training continues to help educate the user community about how a successful attack affects the organization’s finances.

While these initial investments resulted in a positive impact, cyber attacks have become more fluid, aggressive, and overwhelming, even for some of the largest global organizations. Without a continuous change to the email security layer, malicious software attacks, identity theft, and fraudulent email attachments will continue to create more unsuspecting victims.

Trustifi’s strategy promoting a trustworthy consolidation AI-powered email security platform instead of a device helps change the game while reducing the attack vector within your corporate network. A fluid, agile, and flexible advanced threat protection strategy is needed to stop email phishing attacks attempting to access company systems.

Shifting Towards Platform Consolidation to Combat Email Phishing.

Agility over stagnate, fluidness over indecision, enablement over deployment. These terms make Trustifi a global leader in email security. Organizations still need help in the defense-in-depth strategy with various devices and adaptive controls running on legacy contracts or amortization schedules that will continue to be out-smarted by hackers.

Organizations wanting to stay ahead of the global hackers and ever-so-aggressive email phishing campaigns are taking the email security platform consolidation strategy much more seriously.

Here are some value incentives for organizations to take into consideration when considering a platform consolidation:

The cost of email security becomes predictable and with no cost increase surprises.

• Enabling additional capabilities, including email archiving, DLP, tokenization, and email encryption, happens without affecting the user community.
• Additional features added by Trustifi become available instantly through the single console management center.

• Trustifi-managed email detection and response(EMDR) service is available for all clients needing additional resources for incident response, adding other features, and helping with compliance reporting.

• The cost per user becomes affordable for all organizations with a consolidated platform.
• Trustifi’s advancement using artificial intelligence and machine learning remains the gold standard for the email security industry.

Staying ahead of phishing emails, malicious code attacks, and online scams requires artificial intelligence expertise embedded within the email security platform. Static rulesets and outdated behavior analysis are ineffective against these next-generation malware infections, AI-enabled bulk email phishing, and other improper activity.

Why Trustifi?

The most valuable asset to any organization, other than its employees, is the data in its email–and Trustifi’s fundamental aim is keeping clients’ data, reputation, and brand safe from all threats related to email. With Trustifi’s Inbound Shield, Data Loss Prevention, and Email Encryption.

With Trustifi vendor consolidation and reduction of resource cost allocation, they align with the needs of small and midsize clients while not compromising on email protection, all with a single pricing model.

Trustifi Single Console for Ease-of-Use Management.

With a limited IT and security staff at most organizations, the clients need security solutions to manage more efficiently while meeting HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance mandates.

Trustifi’s Email detection and response (EMDR) offers clients access to experts to assist with the implementation.

Culture

As a global cybersecurity provider of both inbound and outbound email protection. Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to world security regulations, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.