Cloud Email Security

What is Cloud Email Security?

Email-borne threats are on the rise and organizations must be prepared for their next attack at a moment’s notice.

A vast amount of sensitive data is exchanged via email, and organizations need to prevent this data from falling into the wrong hands.

How prepared are you in the event of an email-borne cyber attack? Do you have the necessary defences in place?

Cloud email security solutions offer comprehensive email protection against a wide range of known threats - including spam, malware, viruses and malicious links/attachments - while also defending against previously unknown attacks, using behavioral analysis.

With the rise in remote working over the past two years – and with most organizations adopting cloud-based email systems – organizations are increasingly moving to the cloud for their email security.

Why Cloud Email Security?

Email threats are increasingly becoming more sophisticated in nature, making them difficult to detect and prevent. The best method for securing email is to deploy an email security solution. With no hardware to purchase, cloud-based email security solutions are quick, easy and inexpensive to implement, administer and operate. However, not all cloud email security solutions are the same. Some have better spam detection rates than others. Even a 97% spam detection means 3% of malicious emails can penetrate your defences.

The leading cloud email security solutions have over 99% spam detection rates and will block even the most sophisticated attacks, such as impersonation and business email compromise (BEC), from reaching your network by using multi-layered intelligence and detection engines. However some malicious emails can always filter through and as a result employees – who act as both an organization’s biggest threat vector and also best line of defence - need to be trained how to identify and respond to common email threats Cyber-security awareness training provides phishing simulation tests to staff and allows organizations to identify their most at risk employees and to tailor their training accordingly.

Features of Cloud Email Security

Here are some of the main features of cloud email security solutions, such as SpamTitan:

• Targeted threat protection, that provides real-time scanning and blocking of suspect websites and attachments.
• Email encryption to secure sensitive data and make compliance easy.
• Sandboxing technology provides an isolated test environment to inspect incoming suspicious files or code, to prevent employees from inadvertently downloading malware.
• Real-time URL scanning: URLs may appear safe on delivery, and bypass filters, however hackers can rotate the URL later. SpamTitan Plus is an added layer of defence that re-scans a URL every time a user clicks on it. If the URL is malicious and a member of your organization clicks on it, they will be re-directed to a block page
• Geoblocking easily restricts/allows emails from specific destinations based on IP or country.
• Outbound spam filters prevent outbound emails being sent from within an organization that may inadvertently contain malware, preventing severe reputational damage and an organizations’ IP from being blacklisted.
• Bayesian Analysis is a machine learning technique that allows organizations to block an email based on its content/attachments, for example messages that contain certain “red flag” phrases. Bayesian analysis learns from each message it scans – the more messages it scans the greater its effectiveness.
• Greylisting prevents emails from unknown sources from entering an organization’s network by rejecting every email and asking for them to be resent. Spammers´ mail servers, being too busy sending out fresh spam, never respond to “resend” requests, and spam emails are never returned.
• Blacklisting/Whitelisting provides organizations with the ability to determine which senders – whose mails may have been previously unrecognised or detected as unsolicited - to accept (whitelisting) or block email from (blacklisting) by adding them to a list

The leading cloud email security solutions have over 99% spam detection rates and will block even the most sophisticated attacks.

Cloud Email Security from SpamTitan

SpamTitan is a cloud email security solution that processes millions of emails per day, with a market leading 99.99% Spam Catch Rate and a 0.003% false positive rate. SpamTitan ensures you won’t be hit by any of the thousands of new threats discovered every hour, with continually updated threat intelligence. Being a cloud-based solution, SpamTitan is compatible with all operating systems and is infinitely scalable.

Fully trust your inbox with SpamTitan – try for free today

Email Threats a Cloud-Based Email Security Solution Helps Solve

SpamTitan cloud-based email security is essential to a multi-faceted security approach to email-borne threats. The type of email threats that SpamTitan helps to solve include:

• Phishing and Credential Theft

Phishing comes in many forms, including clone, barrel, and spear phishing. These phishing types are sophisticated, targeted, difficult to detect, and variants of more general email phishing tactics. Many phishing campaigns focus on specific organizational roles, like a system administrator, to steal that individual's login credentials. The phishing email will contain a malicious link to a spoof website; the site is made to look exactly like the login screen for popular apps such as Microsoft 365. If the phishing individual enters their login credentials into that spoof site, they will be stolen. This all begins with a cleverly crafted phishing email. According to research from the Ponemon Institute, 54% of security incidents are caused by credential theft. 

• Phishing and Data Loss

Once credentials are stolen, they can be used to enter sensitive areas of the corporate network and exfiltrate data. The Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report for 2022 (DBIR) found that around half of data breaches began with stolen credentials.

• Phishing and Malware 

The latest IBM Threat Intelligence report outlines the malware landscape and has this to say:

"It has become increasingly commonplace for malware to be delivered through malicious Microsoft Office documents, usually attached to phishing emails."

Some phishing emails contain malicious links and some infected attachments. Both can be the starting point for malware infection. 

• Phishing and Ransomware

Ransomware is typically delivered by email or via credentials stolen by phishing. This is borne out by research from ENISA in its 2022 Threat Landscape Report. Coveware researchers concur, finding that phishing is the most common method to deliver ransomware, with infections surging in Q3 2022.

• Financial Theft: Business Email Compromise (BEC)

According to IBM Threat Intelligence, in 2022, 6% of attacks were BEC scams. Business email compromise relies on the social engineering of employees and can lead to large sums of money stolen by hackers. As such, these emails are tailored to trick specific roles, such as CEOs, CFOs, and employees in the accounts department. 

• Negative Impacts on Productivity 

Spam may seem innocuous compared to ransomware, but because of the daily volumes in employees' inboxes, spam emails can impact on productivity. In addition, because of the volume of spam that requires filtering, cloud-based email security solutions like SpamTitan must use intelligent analysis to weed out spam before it hits an employee's inbox.

Cloud-based or On-premise, What's the Difference?

The modern enterprise mixes central and satellite office, remote, and third to fifth-party entities. This mosaic of employees and non-employees means that the visibility, management, and scalability of apps and solutions are more complex than in an organization that uses an older closed perimeter model.

On-premise email security solutions must be more scalable to handle complicated working environments. Whereas cloud-based email security solutions, like SpamTitan, are designed to be intrinsically scalable, provide dynamic management across expanded networks, and are simpler to deploy across distributed devices.

Sandboxing technology provides an isolated test environment to inspect incoming suspicious files or code, to prevent employees from inadvertently downloading malware.

Three Best Practices Steps to Secure Email

Securing email in an era where cybercriminals focus on this communication channel to hack an organization requires a mix of measures:

Step one: use a cloud-based email security solution

Use a cloud-based email security solution like SpamTitan as your first line of defense. These solutions use multiple layers of protection to detect and prevent phishing and spam from entering your corporate network. This is an essential first step to capturing insidious attempts to trick employees into handing over login credentials. In addition, detecting and preventing ransomware and other malware is also a core capability of cloud-based email security solutions.

Step two: tighten up email authentication

Ensure that a second factor (2FA), such as a mobile authenticator or critical fob device, is used to access an email account. However, 2FA alone cannot be relied upon to prevent email account takeover, so 2FA must be used with the cloud-based email security solution and other measures.

Step three: train staff about email-borne risks

Security awareness training of staff is another layer of protection to prevent phishing emails from tricking employees into clicking malicious links or downloading infected attachments. In addition, Behavior-based security risk training is an important measure to use alongside cloud-based email security. 

What Benefits of Using a Cloud-based Email Security Solution?

Cloud-based email security is designed from the outset to be highly beneficial; amongst the most apparent benefits are the following:

• Fast Deployment

Centralized deployment means fast deployment. Because no software installs are required that slow down deployment, setup and switch to secure emails can be done in minutes.

• Easy Management and Updates

The same centralized model ensures that management, configuration settings, and updates are easy and fast. This is especially important in a threat landscape that can change quickly; the cloud-based email security solution must respond swiftly and apply intelligent measures to stop email threats as they morph using new tactics and techniques.

• Known Costs and No Hardware 

Cloud-based email security is typically billed using a subscription model. This allows an organization to budget more effectively. Cloud-based email security solutions, like SpamTitan, can be highly cost-effective for smaller organizations as there are no associated download or maintenance costs. In addition, SpamTitan needs no hardware, reducing the costs of capital purchase, installation, and configuration.

• Scalable

Companies can expand and contract in terms of staff and device numbers. A cloud-based email security solution is designed to be scalable in line with these changes. SpamTitan makes it very easy to add or remove users at the click of a button, and there is no limit on the volume of emails that can be analyzed. 

• Advanced Email Threat Detection

Cloud-based email security solutions use multiple layers of threat detection. This is to ensure that even sophisticated phishing threats can be captured. Even zero-day and emerging threats can be captured using intelligent layers of threat detection. Additionally, any errant emails that may make it through these increasingly fine-grained nets of protection are sandboxed to double-check that they are legitimate before sending them to the recipient(s).

• Compliance Support

Organizations come under stringent data protection regulations that include email-borne content. Laws such as CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and HIPAA requirements expect that robust security measures are applied, and non-compliance results in heavy fines. SpamTitan email security ensures that email content is checked and emails are secured using encryption and secure archiving. In addition, SpamTitan provides a reporting feature that generates reports to document compliance.

Using an MSP to Deliver Cloud-based Email Security

Cloud-based email security solutions, like SpamTitan, are ideal for smaller enterprises as they can be delivered by a managed service provider (MSP). The MSP model of cloud email security means that the SMB can have cost-effective, enterprise-level protection. This model also ensures that the SMB gets exceptional security support, and the MSP manages the solution, removing the need for a small organization to find skilled security staff.