How To Prevent Malware Attacks (Email Edition)

• The virus (or malicious software) replicates itself in several places in the file system, making it difficult to eradicate every instance.
• Invasion of desktops and browsers with unwanted advertisements from potentially malicious websites, creating a massive annoyance for the user.
• Keystroke-logging and capturing users’ actions without their knowledge while slowly sapping the system’s performance.
• Malware gradually destroys the system’s essential files and makes the device unusable.
• Ransomware malware locks the user out of programs, files, or even the PC itself, sometimes requiring them to pay a fee to regain access.

How to Spot a Malware Attack Inside of Email?

Malware emails have become common in businesses. Sometimes, they are random, broad attacks. They target specific users along with wider groups within organizations. You’ll be able to spot a malware email through several telltale signs.

The Sender

The sender information is always the first thing to verify to detect malware and other threats. Check if the sender is an unfamiliar individual, you have never interacted with before. Look at the email address for spelling errors and alterations. For example, you might correspond regularly with Joe@microsoft.com, but a suspicious email might come from Joe@micros0ft.com. The difference may not be visible if you are not paying close attention.

The Subject

The subject line is the next thing to notice. Is the subject line provoking, tempting, or forcing you to take action? Additionally, the subject line may start with ‘RE:’ claiming to be a response to some previous email. Take a moment to consider whether you sent that original email.

Links or Attachments

Look at the links or attachments in the email. Are you expecting that person to send a link or attachment? Call the sender to confirm they sent the message even if you wish for something.

Malware attacks can harm many levels, including stealing data and destroying entire systems or networks. The majority of cybercrimes are committed using malware, often in the form of large-scale attacks resulting in identity theft and fraud. In addition to targeting individuals, malware attack businesses and governments.

The FBI reports consumer victims reported total cybercrime-related losses of $4.2 billion in 2020, a 69% increase from 2019. Part of these losses resulted from malware attacks.

The Threat of Malware Through the Email Channel

Phishing and related threats, such as smishing and business email compromise, were the most common primary causes of data breaches due to malware infection in 2021, according to Verizon’s 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report. Internal education was called out in the report as an adaptive control to stop most malware. Employee training helps internal team members recognize good from nasty emails. They need to know what to look for when receiving an email, and they should report any suspicious activity.

How to Prevent Malware from Exploiting Your Vulnerabilities?

An email gateway solution from Trustifi provides advanced multi-layered protection, including a full spectrum of prevention capabilities to stop email-borne threats.

If an email has passed through the spam filters and still contains unknown and potentially malicious attachments, the document can be sent to a digital sandbox for detonation before the user has access to the content.

Role of Data Loss Prevention in Stopping Malware Exploits

DLP is an effective tool for managing sensitive data and stopping malware data exflirtations. Data Loss Prevention solves three significant objectives that apply to most organizations.

• First, is the organization collecting and storing consumer users’ personally identifiable information?
• Second, does the organization have the process and capability to remove the client’s data upon request?
• Third, does the organization have a secure access policy to enable multi-factor authentication based on user actions?

Trustifi’s DLP solution aligns with these objectives. DLP solutions can classify intellectual property in unstructured and structured forms. Data visibility helps organizations gain insight into how individuals interact with data. DLP can remediate a variety of online security challenges, including:

• Data breaches cause damage to the brand, regulatory violations, and loss of trust with customers.
• Data Loss Prevention solutions require involving stakeholders.
• Data Loss Prevention solutions must be implemented correctly and well maintained.
• Data Loss Prevention solutions are complex. Encryption is necessary because it protects data.

Email Encryption and DLP – One Solution for Compliance

Management of DLP tools over time requires continuous evaluation and tuning. Over time, these tools become unmanaged and lose their effectiveness. Many organizations only turn on “the basic DLP” rules because of the lack of resources to manage the solution full-time. Hackers know this. The hacker community knows that most security adaptive controls rarely get fully deployed, except for organizations that spend big dollars outsourcing to an MSSP or MSP service.

The following events are some of the leading causes of data leaks in 2022.

1. Misconfigured Software Settings.
2. Social Engineering
3. Recycled Passwords
4. Poor Encryption
5. Software Vulnerabilities
6. Use of Default Passwords

Gartner often references in their security reports the challenges of misconfigured security solutions impact expected outcomes of SecOps protection strategies.

Data Loss Prevention identified protected compliance content within the email message in parallel with email encryption. It instilled rules to prevent private data from leaving through the email channel by enacting email encryption to protect information attempted by the organizations. Companies should also review their policies around encryption, data sensitivity, and granular visibility.

Enterprises should review:

• Encrypt any email with privacy information. Enabling DLP policies as a system-wide adaptive control will ensure all messages that match privacy rules encrypt the outbound message.
• The organization must enable policies and standards monitoring for risky behavior, external threats, and intentional violation of privacy mandates.

Email Encryption Solution from Trustifi

Trustifi One-Click Compliance™ and Data Loss Prevention features make it easy to prove privacy compliance and ensure your data remains secure. The email administrator quickly selects which standards and Data Loss Prevention policies must comply with compliance requirements. Trustifi’s intelligent AI Engine will scan all outbound emails for sensitive content such as student records and automatically encrypt them.

With Trustifi’s One-Click Compliance™, the solution takes the complexity out of compliance.

For an additional layer of security between potential attackers and your sensitive data, you can request that recipients verify their identities via multi-factor authentication (MFA).

With Trustifi, data collectors can send secure encrypted emails without remembering to click the encrypt email button. Just as quickly, recipients open an encrypted email with a single click even if they don’t have Trustifi themselves.

The email administrator sets all the DLP and email encryption policies on the backend to prevent accidental data loss of confidentiality from being sent externally.

Other solutions require users to log in to a portal to access encrypted emails, adding complexity to sending and receiving messages.

“One-Click” Encrypt and Decrypt with Trustifi

Trustifi makes sending and opening emails simpler than ever. No log-ins, portals, or passwords are needed.

Groundbreaking Technology Supporting Optical Character Recognition Technology

Trustifi’s OCR technology uses machine learning to scan email attachments such as images and PDF files. It recognizes elements such as a credit card scan or a screenshot of a financial statement and categorizes those attachments as sensitive. The attachment file is automatically encrypted, reducing the opportunity for employees/individuals to transmit unprotected confidential material.

Emails Get Automatically Scanned

The system automatically scans outgoing emails, applies the rules your administrator sets, and then finds the One-click email encryption software with no input from the user. This ensures that sensitive data and attachments are not at risk before reaching their intended recipient.

Culture

Trustifi’s email security services feature a comprehensive suite of email tools for advanced threat protection from malware attacks and other malicious software, easily configurable Data Loss Prevention, and enterprise email encryption. Trustifi’s easy-to-use software is unmatched in its user-friendliness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. 

Trustifi’s time to value, ease of deployment, and lower cost of ownership for SecOps make the company culture secure and a financial match for any client seeking email security, data exfiltration, and message encryption.

Why Trustifi?

Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on security software as a service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest to use and deploy email security products (including malware prevention), providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor.

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.