DO YOU RECOGNISE THAT EMAIL ADDRESS?

Are you aware, that when you receive an email from someone you recognise, that it might NOT be from who you think it is? There are, on average, over three billion fake emails sent around the world, every single day!

There are many forms of cyberattack targeted at most industry types but still, (spear) phishing and spoofing emails remain one of the highest forms of successful cybercrime.

Why is this you may ask? Put simply, because companies and organisations do not implement industry-standard authentication protocols to their email systems.

 

PHISHING AND EMAILS

Some shocking statics from the GOV.UK website show the extent of the problem (figures from March 2020) are as follows:

Almost half of businesses (46%) and a quarter of charities (26%) report having cyber security breaches or attacks in the last 12 months. Like previous years, this is higher among medium businesses (68%), large businesses (75%) and high-income charities (57%)

Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/cyber-security-breaches-survey-2020/cyber-security-breaches-survey-2020

Phishing is the first delivery method for other types of malicious software. A phishing attack isn’t just targeted at gaining information. Phishing attacks can also be used to distribute malicious programs, such as ransomware. Email attachments are still the main method of delivery for malicious programs.

Over £2 million was been lost to coronavirus-themed scams, phishing emails and other fraud in the UK alone as cyber criminals look to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic for their own gain.

 

HOW TO COMBAT THE PROBLEM

Figures from the US for 2020 alone were very staggering….Up to 97% of emails cannot be identified by the receiver as fake and not sent by a genuine person.

Up to 30% of emails are targeted to a specific individual, and despite the training and publicity surrounding fake emails containing links to malicious websites that download viruses into a company’s network, as many as 12% of users actually open and click on the link!

85% of US organisations have suffered from phishing attacks. These attacks are everywhere, and most organisations will encounter them at one point or another.

Office 365 does attempt to filter out incoming mail through the Microsoft data centres but even they do not have dedicated and sophisticated software to sniff the email for viruses contained within links and attachments and traditional anti-spam software which is not the same as email security as it only filters out some emails and cannot detect malicious contents.

Fully managed services from companies such as Trend Micro are specialists in threat detection, email security, antivirus and antimalware for cross platform protections.

These companies collect all emails and pass them (always unopened and cannot read the content) through their dedicated email servers which have highly developed software to probe and penetrate emails and attachments, ‘sniffing’ out any potential threats and putting suspect emails in quarantine within their systems – so the email does not get delivered to the user in the first place.

 

WORKING FROM HOME

Off-site email security systems are becoming increasingly more powerful and also can scan direct emails from Microsoft as the next layer of protection from phishing scams.

Microsoft Office 365 documents are also vulnerable to being hacked now and your files and folders are potentially able to be injected with viruses so when you download a saved document, the virus comes down with it.

In the present ‘working from home’ environment, company documents may be downloaded and upload multiple times be multiple users and increase the rick of a hacker gaining access to company servers and information via a laptop at home, which is connected to the company systems.

All in all, everything that comes in and goes out from the cloud is not always as secure as you may think it is or ought to be.

 

MAXIMUM NETWORKS

Don’t get caught out, get in touch with the Maximum Networks team team today on 0330 102 7444 or using our contact form