Corporate Benefits of an Anti-Phishing Tool

Cybercriminals use several forms of phishing to trick employees into divulging sensitive data, including customer information and internal network credentials. Not only does phishing aid criminals in stealing data, but it also helps them inject malware or ransomware into corporate devices, servers, or network resources. Data breaches from phishing attacks devastate business continuity, brand reputation, and customer loyalty, but corporations can fight back with an anti-phishing tool.
 

How Do Phishing Threats Work?

Most people are aware of phishing but have poor intuition in detecting it. To avoid detection, phishing email authors use names, logos, and domains similar to the official business they pretend to be. One of the first large-scale phishing campaigns used PayPal to trick people. These phishing emails contained the PayPal logo and official disclaimers at the end of a message to make it look like the sender was an official email. Recipients were tricked into clicking a link that pointed to a website containing the official PayPal logo and layout. If recipients didn’t pay close attention to the misspelt domain, they were tricked into divulging their PayPal credentials.

The success of phishing in the 2000s led to numerous variants of original phishing strategies. A phishing email could target specific high-privileged users (e.g., human resources personnel or executives), contain attachments with malicious macros to download malware or work with social engineering to trick accounting people into transferring large sums of money to cyber-criminal bank accounts. 

If employees divulge their network credentials, it’s also possible for attackers to gain access to corporate email accounts. Business email compromise (BEC) gives access to legitimate accounts that can be used to send email messages to other employees. Because these messages are from legitimate hacked corporate accounts, users will be much more likely to open malicious attachments or divulge private information. BEC is one of the more dangerous phishing strategies, and it only takes one person to fall for the phishing email for BEC to cause a critical data breach.

What Can Anti-Phishing Tools Do to Help?

Human error is the biggest threat to corporate security, especially when you entrust employees to detect phishing. Instead of relying on recipients to detect and stop phishing, an anti-phishing tool intercepts and analyzes email messages for suspicious content or attachments. Good anti-phishing tools have an added layer of artificial intelligence used to analyze heuristics and spot zero-day phishing threats.

Instead of sending suspicious emails to a spam box where recipients can still access them, an anti-phishing tool quarantines suspicious emails. Recipients cannot access quarantined email messages, but the quarantined messages are helpful to threat intelligence researchers and corporate administrators. Threat intelligence is the process of constantly researching the dark web and other known cyber-criminal internet locations to find disclosed data after a corporate compromise and breach, zero-day threats, and conversations about current threat strategies. 

Administrators can also review quarantined messages stored on their cloud system. Messages with attachments can be analyzed to understand the intent of the sender. For example, an administrator could identify if the sender intended to install ransomware on the network or install a remote access trojan (RAT) on a system to monitor network data. Reviewing quarantined messages helps administrators understand attacker intent and warn all corporate employees of possible phishing and social engineering threats targeting the corporation.

The technology behind an anti-phishing tool depends on your provider. Providers like TitanHQ PhishTitan use artificial intelligence, threat intelligence data, large databases of domains, and malicious email server IP addresses to block messages and quarantine them. No anti-phishing tool is 100% accurate, but an excellent service offers ways to configure the system to reduce false positives and negatives. Effective anti-phishing tools have a low false positive rate to avoid interruption of legitimate communication. Low false negative rates are also necessary to avoid passing malicious content to recipients. 

Security awareness training is still necessary regardless of the integration of anti-phishing tools. In the event of a false negative result, employees can use their security awareness training to detect malicious email messages. Recipients should be a second layer of defense against phishing rather than the initial layer. Human error is the biggest threat to corporate cybersecurity, so leaving human intervention to a secondary defense strategy improves the effectiveness of anti-phishing strategies.

Cybersecurity is always the most effective when it’s built in layers. The third layer of your cybersecurity strategy for phishing defenses should be antivirus. Like security awareness training, antivirus software should never be the initial defense layer but can strengthen your overall security posture. If your anti-phishing tool returns a false positive and recipients do not detect malicious messages, antivirus software blocks malware from installing on the local device. The additional cybersecurity acts as a final failsafe should the other two layers of your data protection fail.

When an email recipient clicks a link, PhishTitan analyzes the destination and blocks access to the site if it’s determined to be malicious.

Benefits of Using an Anti-Phishing Tool

Aside from the cybersecurity improvements, anti-phishing tools have other benefits for organizations. Administrators responsible for cybersecurity benefit the most from anti-phishing tools because they reduce cyber risks from email-based threats. Most data breaches start with a phishing email, so administrators can more effectively stop data breaches and network compromises using anti-phishing services.

Cloud-based services are the most convenient for administrators to configure. Administrators sign up for anti-phishing services and point their DNS entries to the cloud-based servers, and protection from phishing starts immediately. Cloud-based anti-phishing also benefits managed service providers responsible for protecting multiple corporate environments. Dashboards hosted in the cloud provide a managed service provider (MSP) or corporate administrator with a full view of email activity, the number of phishing emails blocked, and general statistics on quarantine activity.

Convenience isn’t always a benefit in cybersecurity. Convenience can often be a risk, but cloud-based anti-phishing services reduce cyber risks while offering convenience. The cloud provider maintains the software and continuously updates the database of threats and malicious domains instead of relying on corporate administrators or MSPs to download patches manually. Updates to the anti-phishing tool are installed in the background while the service protects email inboxes without the downtime and interruption of cybersecurity services.

Another benefit for corporations is the improvement in compliance. Most compliance regulations require corporations to have the highest standards in data protection to avoid data breaches. With anti-phishing tools, corporations stop most email-based threats from stealing data. Reducing risks also reduces the chances of hefty fines for violations after a compromise of corporate systems and exfiltration of data. Customers remain loyal, and corporations don’t have the massive litigation fees associated with compliance fines for a data breach. Reducing risks lowers threats to corporate revenue and overall compliance costs.

How PhishTitan Can Help

PhishTitan is a next-generation solution for your email cybersecurity. It incorporates artificial intelligence, threat intelligence, and algorithms explicitly built for detecting current phishing attacks and tomorrow’s zero-day threats. Not only does PhishTitan stop incoming threats, but administrators can run post-delivery scans on current inboxes to detect phishing and malware attachments and remove them from employees' view. 

When an email recipient clicks a link, PhishTitan analyzes the destination and blocks access to the site if it’s determined to be malicious. Web content filtering is usually reserved for secondary products, but PhishTitan incorporates it directly into their software to protect corporations from phishing fully. In addition to protecting from web-based threats, PhishTitan rewrites URLs to identify malicious embedded links in email messages.

To learn more about PhishTitan, review all our product features or sign up for a free trial and get started with email protection with an effective anti-phishing tool.