Email … Still the Most Common Threat Vector

Email … Still the Most Common Threat Vector

With the rapid advance of cyberattacks, much of the industry has shifted its focus from traditional to more sophisticated and emerging threats.

Malvertising, cloud services security compromises, breaches in IoT networks, and a slew of other nascent dangers have taken over much of the contemporary cyber security conversation.

While it is important to investigate and defend against novel threats, this should never come at neglecting the fundamentals.

Some Things Don’t Change

In their most recent Content Inspection Forecast, industry leader IDC laid out the most important digital content threats to companies over the coming years.

IDC analysts put it quite bluntly, email remains by far the most vulnerable attack surface for companies worldwide. “Email is the most popular threat vector for attackers to use for delivering malware to an organization”, reads the report. “Email is also a direct line of contact between users and cybercriminals, leading to billions of dollars of fraud and business email compromise every year.”

While the vulnerability of email is not new, technological innovations have allowed criminals to create more complex attacks, with more effective countermeasures, that can be launched at much larger scales.

Recent research by UK cyber experts has pointed to the incredible simplicity of executing high-level spoof emails, the classic attack involving the forging of a sending address by pretending to be someone else. Modeling the potential effects of automation technology, the report showed how these attacks could be delivered to anywhere between eighty to ninety-seven percent of the world’s top domains without triggering any defense measures.

The issues with email lie primarily with typical security configurations on email platforms. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) usually do not protect the authenticity of the “From” header in email contents, which is the only address that end-users can see.

These key vulnerabilities remain the primary opening for the vast majority of cyber attacks.

Recent investigations into email-based threats have determined that as much as ninety-one percent of all cyberattacks originate with an email message.

Countering the Email Threat with Science 

The GTB platform is the very cutting edge of Data Protection solutions.

GTB does not rely on prebuilt algorithms that can allow novel threats to slip through the cracks.

Instead, GTB is built on patented and proprietary artificially intelligent technology that identifies threats such as data exfiltration.  This allows GTB’s Data Protection that Workstm system to identify threats as they emerge. 

This unique capability also allows the platform to locate and identify potentially dangerous email messages with a wide variety of indicators.