Enterprise Email Security in 2024: Everything you Need to Know

The global threat landscape changes almost daily. New attack methods, more email phishing attacks, and a continuous rise in business email compromise (BEC) compel CISOs and CIOs to evaluate and adjust strategies toward enterprise email security.

Like any other security reference architecture, email security needs to become more agile and less about setting and forgetting mindset. Hackers empowering themselves with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and exceptionally well-executed social engineering attacks continue to cause financial and brand issues from small to global organizations.

Trustifi, a global leader in advanced enterprise email security, understands the complexity of preventing next-generation email phishing, ransomware, and zero-day attacks from these AI-enabled hackers.

Preventing next-generation attacks starts with organizations assessing what enterprise email security means to them.

Introduction to Enterprise Email Security.

Enabling next-generation enterprise email security requires a strategy process of evaluation, review, assessment, needs analysis, operational review, alignment with compliance and regulations, and cost evaluation.

Is this something an organization needs to take on? What happens to the days when small-to-medium, mid-enterprise, and the global 2000 organizations simply ordered a secure email gateway (SEG)?

The world changed, and so did the cyber threat landscape. Local script kiddies became global hackers roaming the dark web, accessing tools like ransomware malware, email phishing scripts, and stolen credentials. With the simplification of access to these tools, the velocity went from a few thousand attacks to over 3 billion in a single day.

Organizations distressed by cyber-attacks, including ransomware, credential harvesting, and data theft, already feel pressured to deploy additional enterprise email security products to stop the attack. However, hackers know this and often will make a few adjustments to their attack threads and relaunch. This concept of zero-day is nothing new; however, preventing these attacks requires a new way of thinking.

Enterprise email security is more about developing a comprehensive and layered strategy to stop multiple attack vectors simultaneously while staying current with the latest threat vectors.

Understanding the Need for Enterprise Email Security.

Complexity email phishing attacks, credential theft from embedded malicious links, and social engineering attacks compel organizations to develop an enterprise email security culture.

Email remains a common target for phishing attacks. It is essential to implement robust email security measures. Advanced technologies like AI, ML algorithms, and sophisticated threat detection systems can help prevent phishing attempts and other complex attacks from reaching your Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 email users.

Organizations enable layers of email security covering inbound and outbound channels as a first step. Organizations developing an enterprise-wide email security architecture must understand the need to deploy the inbound filtering with the outbound.

User Education is a must! Part of every enterprise email security plan needs to have attack simulations, quarter cybersecurity training for the users, and an annual penetration test done by third-party white-hat ethical hackers. The data collected by the ethical hackers and results from the email phishing simulations provide exceptional content for CISOs and CIOs to gauge their risk within their end-user community.

What Are Some Critical Components Needed for Enterprise Email Security?

Early email security began with foundation technologies and accessories like any other enterprise architecture. Those days are, thankfully, gone. Each element within enterprise email security architecture is essential. Advanced email security solutions have a symbian relationship at every layer. Each layer has a purpose and responsibility to support other elements within the architecture.

How Important is the Inbound Filter?

Inbound Shield begins by being the core scan, email filtering, and decision component of all emails destined to reach the user community. The modern inbound filter engines look for several attack vectors:

• Spam
• Graymail
• Impersonation Attempts
• Malicious email links
• Weaponized attachments
• Cleverly written text competes with threats to expose your most secret files.
• Identify known rogue email addresses and fraudulent domains.
• Validate SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for domain authentication.

The inbound engine has several checks to determine if an email from a rogue email domain is high risk enough to quarantine or block the message. These layers embedded within the inbound engine are designed to stop sophisticated email threats and lower the organization’s overall email security risk.

The Importance of the Outbound Filter Engine.

Outbound filter plays an even more critical role as a complimentary and essential piece of the enterprise email security architecture. Outbound filtering, similar to inbound, scans all messages leaving the email system. This critical security adaptive control looks for content-specific elements, including:

• Social Security numbers
• Driver’s License numbers
• Credit Card number
• Medical Record ID
• Employee ID
• Employee personal information
• Client specific data
• Financial information

Outbound and inbound both have equal responsibility to protect the organization’s users and data.

Layering in Email Encryption and Data Loss Prevention, A Must.

Furthermore, placing email encryption and data loss prevention (DLP) within the outbound protection strategies is optimal for protecting data. These essential adaptive controls provide content security and data protection while being transparent to the user community. As part of the outbound workflow, a message becomes scanned, and the system detects possible sensitive data; organizations can establish outbound policies for automation to execute:

• Automatically encrypt the outbound message.
• Leverage Data Tokenization by Trustifi to shield sensitive data.
• Block the message from leaving the organization.

Outbound protection plays a critical role in supporting inbound filtering. Most inbound filters block nearly 99% of all spam and email phishing attacks. However, thanks to the evolution of email threats, some email-based phishing attacks and spam will get to the user. A message embedded with malicious code or link attempts a data filtration; the outbound is their block of the action.

The likelihood of success of a malicious payload executing and stealing data becomes very low, thanks to the critical partnership between the inbound and outbound filters.

What Are Some Common Threats Targeting Enterprise Email Systems?

Organizations face an enormous number of cyber attacks through email channels. Email phishing, impersonation, credential harvesting, data exfiltration, and ransomware attacks happen several times a day again. Often, these attacks are masqueraded by legitimate emails, voice email messages requesting personal information, malicious text messages, or even a phone call from someone claiming to know you.

In the past, these attack vectors would often be independent attacks. These attacks now form a kill chain by enabling multiple attack methods within a sequence.

Hackers following the Lockheed Martin Kill Chain will execute the following steps in their attacks:

• Reconnaissance: Hackers will harvest credentials by stealing email addresses and trolling social media identity targets.
• Weaponization: Hackers will embed phishing messages and ransomware malware payloads within emails.
• Delivery: Hackers love to use email phishing because it is still effective in getting their payloads to their targets.
• Exploitation: The malware propagates across adjacent systems after the email phishing message delivers the ransomware payload.
• Installation: Once the malware moves laterally through the target’s network as it installs the ransomware code on vulnerable hosts and devices.
• Command and Control: The ransomware communicates through the victim’s network to a series of malicious websites, looking for instructions before executing the disk encryption.
• Actions on Objectives: Now that the hacker has placed ransomware within the victim’s network, the email-based phishing attack loaded with executable malware files bypassed the victim’s threat detection capabilities.

Case Study: TSMC Supplier Hit by LockBit Ransomware Attack 2023.

“TSMC identified Kinmax Technology, one of the company’s suppliers, as the principal victim of the breach and that LockBit had demanded a hefty US$ 70 million ransom. Kinmax Technology confirmed the unauthorized access and theft of data but assured that the data was unrelated to the app used by their customers – emphasizing that no customer data was compromised.”

The hackers used the following kill chain to achieve their goal:

• Distributed Denial of Service Attack to take down network security devices and overwhelm application services.
• Email phishing attack against Kinmax technology employees.
• Ransomware malware became embedded within the email phishing message.

What Are Some Best Practices for Strengthening Enterprise Email Security?

Staying ahead of malicious intent of potential threats and all forms of phishing is a continuous work in progress. The journey is still open even after organizations have updated their inbound filtering with cutting-edge technologies, including AI and Ml.

Organizations facing compliance mandates and regulatory requirements continue adding adaptive controls to enhance their enterprise email security strategy. Here are a few best practices all organizations should implement:

• Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): Attaching MFA to every outbound email, including a one-time pin, helps increase the security of the message to ensure only the actual recipient can access the message.
• Patch Management: Yes, patch management is still a thing in IT. Patching endpoint devices, Macs, PCs, mobile devices, terminals, services, cloud VMs, and applications must be updated with the latest security releases.
• Security Awareness: Absolutely a must! Conducting frequent security awareness training programs for users, contractors, and traveling executives reduces the risk of email phishing attacks.

Evaluating Email Security Solutions: What to Look For.

Once the organization embarks on the journey to update its email security posture with a complete enterprise security solution, here are tips to help with your journey:

• Ensure every solution you are reviewing has a trustworthy cloud-based email security platform. Some legacy email security vendors have a hybrid design requiring an on-premise application and a cloud instance.
• Before looking at the various solutions, ensure you define your business, compliance, and regulatory requirements for email protection. Only let the vendors sell you on their solution that fully understands your needs. Leverage third-party consultants for advice and direction as needed.
• Ensure the email security platform is easy to manage. Many platforms come with several security capabilities. However, they become complex to manage over time and often create more security breaches.
• One of the most essential elements when researching an enterprise email security solution is the vendor’s stance on AI and ML. Did the organization invest in AI and ML years ago or just bolt on someone else’s capability? AI and ML are critical in stopping hacker-enabled AI-based attacks.
• After you compiled your needs list, validate if the vendor’s platform helps you consolidate legacy email security products into a single management console along with helping you reduce your cost per license.

What Is The Role of Secure Email Gateways in Enterprise Email Security?

Secure email gateways (SEG) still have a role in the enterprise email security architecture. SEGs could be the pre-scan engineer for inbound filtering or post-scan after the message has cleared another email security solution. However, most organizations moving ahead with a new enterprise email security architecture will probably phase out their existing SEG devices in favor of an integrated cloud email security (ICES) platform like Trustifi.

What Is The Impact of Emerging Technologies on Email Security?

Without Al and ML, organizations will lack accurate indicators of compromise from hacker AI-based attacks. Legacy SEG and first-generation behavior anomaly engines lack the means to stop these next-generation attacks. ICES platforms like Trustifi enable three AI engines within the inbound filter to stop email phishing, protect intellectual property, and stop advanced threats.

Trustifi’s comprehensive solutions powered by AI stop advanced attacks, suspicious links, and malicious files from causing damage.

Case Studies: Enterprise Email Security in Action.

From SMBs to large enterprise organizations, clients moving ahead with an enterprise email security strategy have seen positive results, including reducing email phishing attacks with fewer internal resources with Trustifi’s cloud-based advanced email security platform.

PEJU Winery, Napa Valley, California

Named “BEST WINERY IN North American” by the Discoverer Blog, PEJU Winery began with Tony Peju daring to sell wines in an informal facility: the garage at their vineyard estate in Rutherford, Napa Valley.

Challenge: Chad Culbreth, IT manager for the winery, evaluated some email vendors, including Proofpoint and Mimecast, at the RSA conference. Challenged with increased spam passing through Microsoft’s email security, Chad deployed Mimecast to reduce the impact on his users while simplifying the management overhead.

Solution: Trustifi’s full suite pricing model enabled the winery to access an advanced AI cloud-based email security platform with full integration into a single management console.

Customer Quote: “Trustifi is unmatched in the email security space. Simple to deploy, fast onboarding and user adoption, and at an exceptional price point to meet organizations challenged with budget restraints.”

Northeastern Rural Health Clinic.

NRHC is the largest provider of outpatient care to Lassen County. We currently provide over 50,000 yearly patient visits, covering primary care, obstetrics, urgent care, dental services, health/nutrition/childbirth education, and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.

Challenge: NRHC previously deployed ZIX and Microsoft to help provide email encryption solutions integrated into their messaging workflow to begin the transformation from legacy fax machines to secure email.

Solution: Trustifi also empowered NRHC with its advanced AI-inbound email security filtering capability to help stop malware, ransomware, and other attack vectors through the channel. NRHC also enabled outbound filtering with data loss prevention (DLP) and email archiving for e-discovery.

Customer Quote: “Trustifi has been the easiest to use for email encryption. We previously used Zix and Microsoft, which were hard to use.”

Future Trends in Enterprise Email Security.

Email phishing, identity theft, and deepfake attacks will continue well past 2024. Organizations adopting enterprise email powered by AI and ML will be a much better place to better their organizations than those still trying to get the most out of their legacy SEGs devices.