Spam and phishing emails can create a multitude of problems for your organization from general resource usage to potential data breaches. A next-generation email security appliance (ESA) solves many of the challenges administrators face as they try to stop spam and malicious email from affecting internal systems and data.
They detect email with more advanced technology than older email protection systems that simply looked for phrases and regular expression matches and filtered flagged messages. With sophisticated email security appliances, organizations can greylist messages to reduce the issues of false positives that older email security introduced.
An esa email security appliance is a gateway between incoming mail and your user’s inbox located on the server. Email messages sent from a domain will travel from the source email server to the recipient server. The recipient server then routes messages to the user’s inbox. An email server does not validate if an email is from a legitimate sender unless administrators add a layer of security between the sender and the recipient’s inbox.
Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is one way to defend against malicious email messages. DMARC uses a combination of SPF records and DKIM signing to ensure that the sender is legitimate. These two security components ensure that messages are not from spoofed sender email addresses, and attackers have not tampered with messages.
DMARC is a great step forward towards email security, but it does not analyze the message body. If an attacker has access to stolen email addresses, messages can be sent from legitimate sender addresses and DMARC will allow them to flow to the recipient’s inbox. Next-generation spam detection requires content analysis, and an email security appliance can offer the additional security layers necessary to detect and “greylist” messages.
An esa appliance performs a number of cybersecurity checks and validations before allowing messages to reach the targeted recipient. Greylisting is a strategy that sends emails back to the sender server and asks the server to resend them again. Because spam servers are used primarily for sending emails and not receiving them, the message is not resent and gets flagged as potentially malicious.
Greylisting has its benefits, but next-generation email security appliance solutions perform additional validation. DMARC and greylisting can still be leveraged, but you also get the benefit of antivirus scans on file attachments, integration with backend authorization systems such as Active Directory (Windows) and LDAP. The SURBL and URIBL filters will detect links to compromised sites or domains known to host phishing content.
An email security appliance can be customized based on thresholds. Cybersecurity and marketing departments might need to receive email messages that could be considered spam so that they can review and analyze the content. Administrators can configure the email security appliance to have lower thresholds for these departments but keep the same messages blocked from inboxes in accounting and customer service.
It’s not uncommon for organizations to train employees to spot phishing messages with malicious content. Unfortunately, training only partially reduces stress. Even cybersecurity experts can be the victims of social engineering and phishing, so users should not be expected to detect every malicious message in their inboxes. Organizations need additional strategies to stop phishing emails from being sent to the inbox, which eliminates human error.
Basic spam filters block email based on phrases and sender IP addresses. Sophisticated attackers use clean email servers and will send messages to specific employees. Usually, attackers target users with privileges to sensitive data. For example, an attacker might review corporate LinkedIn profiles, collect a list of email accounts for high-privilege users, and send spear-phishing messages to specific employees.
The phishing emails could contain malicious attachments, a link to a phishing website, or the attacker could create fraudulent invoices to trick employees into sending money.
In many sophisticated attacks, email servers would not detect anomalies and send email messages to targeted recipients. Organizations then must rely on employee training as their next level of defense, which opens risk of human error. With an email security appliance, the organization has an additional layer of cybersecurity to block messages that would otherwise slip through basic email filtering solutions.
Outgoing email is also a concern. Disgruntled employees, malware, or untrained contractors often send sensitive data to an attacker. Insider threats are intentional or unintentional, but an email security appliance will scan these messages to ensure that intellectual property and sensitive data is not packaged in email communication.
Outbound email is not always the result of a malicious insider. It can be from malware infecting a local machine or networking resource. In this case, an email security appliance would detect the malicious outgoing email, alert an administrator, and an administrator can further research into the source of the outgoing messages.
TitanHQ has an email security appliance that solves many of the challenges of email security and helps administrators stop malicious incoming and outgoing messages. Phishing attacks cost US organizations $500 million each year, so the anti-phishing security from TitanHQ can save your organizations millions from litigation, recovery, and brand damage.
The email security appliance from TitanHQ include anti-spam software or anti-spam virtual appliances. Both are effective in blocking spam and phishing, but the one you choose depends on your business needs and the organization’s infrastructure.
The anti-spam solutions offer a detection rate of 99.97%, so you know that your users are safe from incoming malware or phishing messages. Spammers send millions of malicious messages a day. So, you need a solution that will analyze email content and stop it before relying on employees, contractors, and vendors to notice subtleties that could indicate that it’s a sophisticated attack.
Greylisting, content scanning, attachment filtering, and DMARC are all included with TitanHQ’s SpamTitan next-generation advanced email security appliance. This will greatly reduce the threats that continue to plague corporate networks.
