What is Auto-Remediation?

The relentless struggle between enterprises and cybercriminals persists, with phishing causing widespread damage. Cybersecurity focuses on mitigating risks. However, attackers continually modify tactics and techniques, so security administrators must always be on their guard. One way to manage this risk is to act quickly to prevent threats from becoming security incidents. Automation, specifically auto-remediation, automates a security response to a threat, like phishing. This counter-tactic provides security professionals, IT teams, and MSPs a way to automate the tools and processes to prevent cyber-attacks. In this article, we explore what auto-remediation involves and how your company can benefit from automating security.

Why is Auto-Remediation Important?

Cybercriminals are becoming more adept at targeting companies, with almost all companies (90%) falling victim to phishing, and 91% of cyber-attacks originating from phishing emails. However, implementing auto-remediation brings relief, as it significantly reduces the time and cost of managing cyber-attacks. A 2023 report from IBM revealed that the cost of a data breach has increased by 15% to an average of $4.45 million. The report recommends using automation to counter the threat of cyber-attacks, noting that the time to contain an attack is reduced by 108 days, with cost reductions of $1.76 million when automation and AI are used to mitigate and manage attacks.

Cybercriminals use automation to ensure that cyber-attacks are effective and to overload companies defense mechanisms. Where veteran cybercriminals used manual attack tactics, modern cybercrime is now a major business operation, and automation is the best strategy to maximize effort. Automation and, lately, Generative AI are used in phishing to generate emails and automate mass scam mail send outs. Even spear phishing, the targeted form of phishing, uses automation in parts of the attack.

Auto-remediation equips security professionals and IT administrators with powerful tools to combat these sophisticated, and increasingly, automated attack tactics, empowering them to stay ahead in the cybersecurity battle. With auto-remediation, you can feel secure in the knowledge that you have the best defense against these evolving threats.

How Does Auto-Remediation for Phishing Work?

Phishing is a critical cyber threat that automation can mitigate. IT teams and users must usually manage a lot of phishing and spam manually unless they use anti-phishing tools with automation features. 

Automation of phishing threats is essential as the manual identification of phishing and spam takes time and can be prone to human error. Automated and AI-driven anti-phishing tools like PhishTitan are configured to automatically send malicious emails to the Microsoft junk folder. These automated anti-phishing workflows generate notifications for affected users and create ongoing reports for admin and IT.

The anti-phishing process, from detection to remediation of phishing emails, is powered by automation, making cyber-attack management more efficient and accurate. In addition to automation, AI-driven detection capabilities and the process of detection through to remediation are optimized; human error and the workload required by IT and users are massively reduced.

A 2023 report from IBM revealed that the cost of a data breach has increased by 15% to an average of $4.45 million.

Who Benefits from Auto-Remediation?

Anti-phishing auto-remediation empowers administrators. Advanced anti-phishing solutions, like PhishTitan, use auto-remediation and tailor the management of malicious emails based on severity levels. This mitigates the risk and enhances protection against email-based threats. Instead of risking exposure to malicious emails, even with applied banners, PhishTitan allows administrators to divert suspicious emails directly to a junk folder; this adds a layer of risk mitigation for end users and reduces human error.

Auto-remediation is beneficial across the board, including for the following stakeholders:

• MSP Administrators: Auto Remediation reduces the risk for MSP customers and users.
• IT Administrators: Minimizes user risk by tailoring email management to the company.
• End Users: The enhanced protection against malicious emails, afforded by auto-remediation, protects employees. Auto-remediation reduces human error and mitigates accidental engagement with phishing if people ignore warning banners.

The report recommends using automation to counter the threat of cyber-attacks, noting that the time to contain an attack is reduced by 108 days, with cost reductions of $1.76 million when automation and AI are used to mitigate and manage attacks.

IBM Security

More Benefits of Auto-Remediation

Fast Response to Cyber-Threats

Cyber-attackers often exploit vulnerabilities quickly before the bug is fixed. This rapid attack tactic means that a fast counter-response is essential. Auto-remediation provides this rapid response to ensure that even rapid attacks are detected and dealt with. Coupled with AI-enabled detection, auto-remediation ensures that zero-minute phishing attacks and emerging threats are dealt with.

Improved Reliability and Reduced Downtime

Anti-phishing tools that use auto-remediation swiftly respond to and mitigate phishing, ensuring that downtime is kept to a minimum. This improves system reliability and reduces loss of operations. As the average cost of downtime is calculated to be $1,467 per minute, having a means to reduce the costs associated with cyber-attacks and manual remediation saves large sums of money.

Cyber-Threat Mitigation Efficiency

Cyber threats are hard to spot but dealing with cyber-attacks costs time and money. Quick action is crucial. Using automated tools helps to handle threats faster, making it easier and faster to deal with phishing attacks. Automated anti-phishing tools improve data protection compliance by reducing human error and better managing cyber threats. Reports can show how effective auto-remediation is, aiding regulatory compliance efforts.

PhishTitan for Anti-Phishing Auto-Remediation

PhishTitan is an Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES) solution that uses AI and auto-remediation to deal with phishing threats swiftly and efficiently. PhishTitan uses advanced behavioral analytics, AI, and natural language processing to detect and prevent complex phishing threats. Once detected, PhishTitan removes the threat, automatically sending the phishing email to a junk or quarantine folder. The combination of AI-powered detection capabilities and auto-remediation provided by PhishTitan ensures threats are dealt with efficiently and without incurring human error or manual time. PhishTitan directly integrates with Microsoft Outlook to catch complex phishing threats that are missed by Outlook's native security.

PhishTitan, Auto-Remediation, and MSPs

MSPs are ideally suited to deliver PhishTitan to clients using its auto-remediation capability. MSPs must have the efficiency and straightforward approach to remove threats from client users' inboxes that PhishTitan provides.

PhishTitan has powerful features that allow an MSP to tailor and focus on threat detection and auto-remediation. PhishTitan reports, for example, allow an MSP to identify the most targeted customers, allowing focused action to be taken. Also, PhishTitan's "Post Delivery Remediation" feature enables MSPs to remove malicious mail that has arrived in an inbox. Notably, MSPs can automatically remove a threat from multiple users' inboxes at once.

Auto-remediation coupled with AI-powered anti-phishing tools like PhishTitan are essential for mitigating complex phishing attacks.

Ask for a demo of PhishTitan to see how auto-remediation could help your business.