It’s no secret that all of us as remote workers rely heavily on our cloud email and productivity apps to complete important tasks, share sensitive information and send confidential files. But are these applications inherently secure?
The many security gaps created by the sudden and massive shift to remote work, with the addition of employees naturally being less careful in the comfort of their home, created a sea of new opportunities for email and productivity applications attacks. Consequently, organizations must reevaluate their cloud email security strategy and ensure their employees are not left as the organization’s first line of defense.
Imminent threats to Office365 & G Suite
Phishing
Email-based phishing has seen a huge rise in Q3 of 2020, with sophisticated impersonation campaigns aiming to infiltrate organizations by stealing user’s credentials or installing malware on their machines. In Q3 2020, Microsoft was the most frequently targeted brand by cybercriminals. 19% of all brand phishing attempts were related to the technology giant, as threat actors sought to capitalize on large numbers of employees still working remotely during the pandemic. Email was the most popular platform for the delivery of phishing attacks.
Malware
Most malware, including Ransomware, infiltrate organizations through malicious emails. The average cost of ransom payment following a ransomware attack reached $84,000 in Q4 of 2019 and is rising year-over-year. Recent advances in ransomware make it even more dangerous and possibly fatal, one of which is double extortion. Different to “classic” ransomware attacks, in double extortion cyber criminals steal large quantities of sensitive data before encrypting the victim’s database, and then threaten to publish it unless the attacked organization pays their ransom demands.
Why are email attacks so common?
Cyber criminals constantly create increasingly sophisticated campaigns that are designed to bypass traditional security solutions, and exploit human nature. The latter is a crucial point: email attacks rely on the end user to open the attachment, insert their account’s credentials to a phishing site or pay a fake bank account thinking it is a vendor’s account. The success of these attacks, and one of the main reasons they are so lucrative for cyber criminals, is the fact they rely on humans. That means that you need to deploy a security solution that is designed to block and prevent these malicious communications before they reach users.
How to choose the right email security solution?
To help you choose the optimal cloud email & productivity suite security solution, we put together the 5 must-have capabilities of the optimal email security solution, alongside the questions you should ask before making a decision. To learn more we invite you to download our Buyer’s Guide to Email Security.
