Analysis of 1.3M Emails Unveils Hidden Threats Missed by Other Email Security Solutions
Analysis of 1.3M Emails Unveils Hidden Threats Missed by Other Email Security Solutions
Holistic Email Security For SMB Market

Holistic Email Security For SMB Market

Rise of Holistic Email Security and Vendor Consolidation

By 2024, 30 percent of enterprises will adopt cloud-delivered secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, zero-trust network access, and branch office firewall as a service capability from the same vendor.

Smaller companies (SMBs), like more prominent organizations, need an effective Vendor Consolidation Strategy combined with a reduction of adaptive controls. XDR, extended detection, SASE, and email security have become adaptable for SMB clients. By 2025, 50% of SMB security buyers will leverage extended detection and response.

Organizations facing increases in attacks across legacy and evolving vulnerabilities can not continue employing additional products or services to solve the problem. In time, we have so many devices and service layers that the entire security posture becomes unmanageable.

Trustifi Case study: – Vendor consolidation – LA Philarmonic

Even with automated adaptive controls, users will still click on phishing emails.

According to a recent study, 25% of highly trained employees fell for a simulated attack by opening suspicious emails and clicking malicious links or attachments. Your defense solution must stop phishing attacks from getting into user inboxes since a single slip can spell significant trouble. Humans cannot be relied on to block every phishing attack.

It is impossible to eliminate the phishing problem. You might reduce the attacks but not stop them with education. Educated users take the bait once in a while. Therefore, you need to empower your education with advanced anti-phishing technology.

Alignment to MITRE ATT&CK framework as a threat hunting strategy

MITRE helps SMB organizations set a priority based on the alerts where an organization needs to make timely and critical changes to its security posture. Often, this additional layer should not mean adopting a new product or solution. SMBs need solutions that can scale within themselves to realize more value from the current investment. No matter what size, organizations have adopted the MITRE ATT&CK framework to understand better what parts of their environment face increases in attacks.

The data from MITRE helps determine if the current investment in a specific adaptive control like data loss prevention (DLP) is doing its job. Many securities happen because adaptive controls like DLP become unmanageable over time and lose effectiveness. SMB particularly faces this challenge. Many companies do not have a fully staffed security operations center or enough resources to manage several security devices simultaneously.

Consolidation with an effective cost model to service the SMB

Email security platforms must combine and incorporate many email security controls to effectively protect against various threats. These should include pre-delivery filtering (e.g., URL filtering), east/west (e.g., DNS filtering), post-delivery controls (e.g., content filtering) and remediation, and domain name spoofing support together. At the same time, pricing and licensing options from multi-product companies are making packaged solution buying significantly more attractive than point product buying.

Undeniably, the email security market is emulating other mature IT markets, which experienced this consolidation in the past.

  • They consolidated service offerings. Fully integrated email security platforms must easily support hybrid email management and automatically align policies across systems.
  • Threat Intelligence Feeds. Threat intelligence must be the underlying basis of the platform and should support all aspects of automated protection and remediation as well as broader security ecosystem integration.
  • Integration via APIs. Enabling interconnections through APIs that offer a complete security stack integration, including SIEMs, SOARs, endpoints, firewalls, and other third-party security controls and services.
  • Security-as-a-service offering. 24/7/365 services, including exploit protection services that can monitor similar domains, provide incident response, and provide additional reporting and root-cause analysis.
  • Consolidated email and web security. Web security. MFA and encryption must be tightly integrated with email security controls to strengthen the overall security posture.

Growth in the holistic security fabric

Traditional email security solutions eliminate known phishing email sites, but they aren’t aware of the latest sophisticated or previously unknown malicious sites and malware. In a paper by Gartner® titled “How to Build an Effective Email Security Architecture,” a multi-layered anti-phishing solution was recommended to reduce cyber threats.

The Gartner paper cites a Verizon study. According to Verizon, social incidents and security breaches are caused by phishing and pretexting. The recommended architectural approach addresses business email compromise, suspicious URLs, malware, and credential phishing. A multilayered anti-phishing solution is essential to protect your mailbox from advanced email attacks.

Along with combating email attacks, many organizations, including the underserved SMB space, face numerous security and privacy mandates, including CCPA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and HITRUST. The compliance mandates organizations implement email encryption and other security controls to protect the data. Many SMB clients spent capital and resource dollars trying to implement email security built for large organizations to fit into their business model. Many security vendors offer an SMB bundle, often leaving out critical capabilities, reporting, and incident response functions.

Email threats are growing in both volume and sophistication. As a result, IT and security teams are reevaluating their email security controls to determine whether they are adequately protecting against these threats.

Phishing scams account for 95% of businesses’ losses from cybercrime. While SEGs (Secure Email Gateways) may claim to protect emails from all possible threats, they unwittingly send infected emails to users, just waiting for them to act. Since the invention of email, phishing has evolved continuously, and hackers have been finding new ways to infiltrate users’ inboxes and trick secure gateways.

Spear phishing example

The Naples City Council claims a highly advanced spear phishing attack was responsible for a $700,000 hack. According to a news release, the attacker provided a fake bank account to receive the funds. The fake account was associated with a construction company working on a project in downtown Naples at the time.

The move towards a holistic security-as-a-service

According to a recent survey by Gartner, 90% of organizations are now using a cloud-based email platform, with 84% using Microsoft Office 365.

The growing email threat landscape—Email threats have escalated to unprecedented levels.

The small-to-medium (SMB) marketplace specific is more impacted than the rest. SMBs face continued challenges in the following areas:

  • Unable to recruit and retain experienced cybersecurity personnel
  • Unable to support multiple security and configurations
  • Unable to stay on the monitoring, response, and remediation of security events
  • Unable to sustain the increase in licensing, product maintenance, and managed service costs across all products within their network.

Call to action

Email security has become an increasingly important issue for many companies, and they’re now looking at how they can improve and consolidate it in the next 12 months.

Security teams are under increasing pressure to consolidate their technology stacks to reduce the complexity of the security environment, strengthen their overall security postures, and simplify the deployment and maintenance of security technologies.

Trustifi holistic email security platform for SMB

Trustifi’s holistic email security service offers several capabilities to the SMB, including one-click compliance for email encryption, data loss prevention, inbound and outbound phishing, malware protection, and security as a service offering.

  • The Trustifi Inbound Shield™ is cloud-based, easy to install, and doesn’t require any architecture changes. You get peace of mind that your emails are protected without any complex setup or concerns about missing email messages. Plus, it deploys in minutes, not days.
  • The Trustifi Outbound Shield automatically scans and encrypts outgoing email messages according to administrators’ policies, so any emails that contain sensitive information are automatically secured.
  • The Trustifi One-click for compliance for encryption. With the One-Click Compliance tool, administrators can easily set the platform to screen emails to ensure they automatically comply with more than ten regulatory compliance guidelines.
  • The Trustifi Data Loss Prevention. The system automatically scans outgoing emails and applies the rules set by your administrator, then finds the keywords and automatically encrypts and locks the relevant outgoing emails without any input from the user.
  • The Trustifi support for OCR scanning. Trustifi’s OCR technology uses machine learning to scan email attachments such as images and PDF files. It then recognizes elements such as a credit card scan or a screenshot of a financial statement and categorizes those attachments as sensitive.

Trustifi ease-of-use deployment and manageability. Trustifi email security can be enabled in minutes by leveraging API connections to 0365 and Gmail. No complex setup, adjustments to A or MX records, or other changes to your DNS.

Conclusion

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.

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