The Trouble with Email

Email: If it was switched off suddenly now, everything would stop. Businesses, government and in fact, pretty much every organisation makes massive use of it. It is not something that we even consider most of the time, we accept it in the same way that we accept electricity; it is not something that we think about, we just use it to achieve other things.

The flip side of this is that it can be used against us in increasingly insidious ways. Did you realise that email is the number one delivery vehicle for most malware? Do you know that the number of such attacks is massively increasing year on year? Apparently, 91% of successful attacks begin with a phishing email.

Email is a very powerful medium, unconsidered by most people that use it and as a result, the dangers that come with it are underestimated. There are two approaches to keeping your organisation safe against these threats and you should use both: ensure that your email is security filtered and that you security-train your staff on an ongoing basis.

Let’s start with the training side of things – meet KnowBe4 Security Training.

For any organisation, your members of staff are your biggest potential security flaws. This cannot be overstated: I have known some very bright people do some very dumb things which have led to disaster. In one case, (no names – no pack drill), a chap opened the wrong email attachment and caused his entire network to be locked down by ransomware. Then, once the network had been restored, he opened the same attachment again, and brought the network down again! This is a bright guy, just doing his job. It just goes to show that this can happen to anyone…

In today’s business environments, your employees are frequently exposed to sophisticated phishing and ransomware attacks. The old-school training doesn’t do a good enough job: you need something that will remain up-to-date and keep awareness of the issues fresh. If your staff was software, you would get it patched to deal with its security flaws; think of KnowBe4 as being ongoing patching for your employees.

The training works in a couple of ways:

1. nline courses that your staff can fit in whenever they have a few spare minutes. These are all monitored, and the results recorded. You can login to a central console and see who has done the training, who has passed, etc. The system can be set to automatically send out reminder emails and to ensure that those who need more training are automatically entered into appropriate courses. It can be a good set it & forget it solution with campaigns that basically run themselves well into the future.
2. You can set up and run your own phishing. The concept is that you teach your staff to spot malicious emails by sending such things to them and getting them to press a “Phish Alert” button on their email client when they spot it. You can see who spots and reports them, and who falls for them and clicks through: this is useful when you are deciding who needs additional training.

KnowBe4 training turns your staff into a human firewall, capable of stopping malicious email attacks.

Now for the Email Security Filtering Service from The Email Laundry.

In simple terms, The Email Laundry’s Email Security Filtering Service gets your email and automatically filters it before passing it onto you. It checks for the obvious viruses and malware plus it filters out phishing emails and spam.

One of the biggest changes recently has been a shift away from using malicious attachments to a preference for utilising malicious URLs, instead. This means that conventional antivirus software would have nothing malicious to detect on an incoming email, and so would not react. The Email Laundry however, filters out such things before they get to your employees’ inboxes.

In most cases, the activation of digital attacks is completely accidental and simply caused by someone opening the wrong email. An email that would have never landed in their inbox with the right security system.

The Email Laundry Is the Leading Cloud-Based Email Security Service

• No Hardware;
• No Software;
• No maintenance;
• N Hassle.

Here are some of the features that The Email Laundry employs to keep your emails, and your company, safe from attack:

• Stop all known viruses;
• Capture over 99.99% of spam with almost zero false positives;
• Provide phishing protection against emails with malicious web links;
• Includes URL scanning to identify threats;
• CEO fraud and ransomware protection.

In Q1 2018, 23.69% of Internet user computers worldwide experienced at least one Malware-class attack. That is a scary statistic and it should be enough to get anyone’s attention!

To be put in touch with a participating Brigantia partner for help and advice, then please call Brigantia on 020 3358 0090 or email partnersupport@brigantia.com