What are the Advantages of an Anti-Phishing API?

Humans are your weakest link, and phishing takes advantage of human error. Phishing authors push a sense of urgency on recipients, so employees are often rushed into performing dubious actions without thinking of the consequences. The result is malware installed on the business environment, stolen money or network credentials, a ransomware incident, or disclosure of sensitive information. An anti-phishing API provides businesses with development opportunities to customize their phishing detection and what to do with flagged messages.

Risks of No Phishing Security

Security awareness training helps with phishing detection, but it’s not enough. Employees can be trained to identify phishing, but even highly qualified employees occasionally fall for a phishing attack. Spear phishing authors often target high-privilege users, including network administrators or security people. These people have a better sense of phishing protocol, but they can sometimes fall for a sophisticated phishing strategy.

Most people consider large technology companies like Facebook and Google the best in the cybersecurity world. Still, these companies with the best cybersecurity defenses on the market have been victims of phishing, too. From 2014 to 2016, a single phishing author created fraudulent invoices and convinced large technology companies –including Facebook and Google—to send millions of dollars to pay them. All accounting people in these enterprise corporations are likely trained to identify these attacks, but the security awareness training did not help employees identify fraudulent invoices.

A loss of money isn’t the only risk from a phishing email. More common in recent years is the threat of ransomware. Ransomware has been circulating on the internet for years. Still, it’s much more popular in recent years for ransomware’s ability to blackmail companies into paying money without them having a way to get out of the ransom. Ransomware encrypts files across the entire environment. Good ransomware keeps the key unattainable from researchers and anti-malware software, forcing businesses to pay the money.

During a ransomware infection, some encrypted data is sent to the attacker. This data is used to blackmail victims into paying a ransom if they restore data from backups. Attackers know that some of their victims can recover data from cloud backups, so keeping sensitive data is their backup to blackmail victims. Victims recovering data from backups are told that the sensitive data will be disclosed to the public if they do not pay the ransom. For businesses with sensitive customer data, disclosing their data from phishing and ransomware attacks can harm their brand reputation and destroy customer trust in their internal security. Both risks result in a negative impact on revenue.

Malicious attachments aren’t the only way to gain access to business data. Embedded links to new domains with malware downloads or pages pretending to be legitimate businesses trick users into divulging their credentials or providing cyber-criminals with sensitive data. The domain might contain content that looks like the targeted businesses in sophisticated attacks. Employees might miss subtle clues that the page is not official, or they might miss the misspelled domain to indicate that it’s not a legitimate business. Once the attacker tricks one employee, it’s possible that stolen credentials can be used to send phishing messages to other employees using the stolen business email account.

For most attackers, phishing is a strategy for monetary payout. Even if a business pays a ransom, the risks to revenue after the public becomes aware of the impact are unavoidable. Class action lawsuits, remediation, incident response, and the resources necessary to deal with the aftermath of a phishing-based data breach cost millions, and the impact on the brand can last for years.

An anti-phishing API add-in increases email security if your organization uses Microsoft Office 365.

Benefits of an Anti-Phishing API

An API is an application programming interface that lets your organization create custom phishing detection scripts and software. It would be a mistake to build algorithms and artificial intelligence to build the phishing detection mechanism so businesses can leverage third-party APIs to create their front-end interface and results based on their internal business rules.

It takes security researchers and software developers years to perfect a phishing detection algorithm. An anti-phishing API has the algorithms running on the backend, and results can be delivered to front-end programmers. For example, a front-end programmer can call the anti-phishing API with an email’s sender address, headers, and message content. Algorithms using artificial intelligence run in the backend on API servers and return a result. The result can be as little as “yes” or “no” to tell the front-end programmer if an email is suspicious. Applications with an anti-phishing API integration can perform any number of actions based on internal business rules. 

Customizations of quarantined email messages or business rules based on anti-phishing API results are the most significant benefit for organizations. An out-of-the-box solution handles all front-end programming and provides administrators with configuration options. Still, internal corporate developers can use an API when they want more customizations for phishing email detection.

Most out-of-the-box phishing detection software forwards email to a safe location called the quarantine. A quarantine is only accessible to administrators, and users do not see the email until it’s cleared after an administrator reviews the message content. With an API and its developers, businesses can choose to perform actions on an email, such as flagging it as suspicious and sending it to a specific email inbox. Custom development could also include reports on the number of phishing messages received, the number of false positives, the number of reported messages flagged as false negatives, and the number of flagged messages quarantined.

An anti-phishing API add-in increases email security if your organization uses Microsoft Office 365. It’s common for targeted attacks to focus on enterprise applications, and many large businesses use the Office 365 platform, including Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Office 365 software allows document owners to create macros, which can be used to download and install malware. With sophisticated coding, an attacker can attach a Word or Excel document to an email and trick users into running a malicious macro. Anti-phishing APIs and associated providers offer a way to block these messages and protect the business environment.

How PhishTitan Helps Stop Phishing Attacks

PhishTitan is more than a simple API with basic information. It’s an enterprise-level application for detecting current and zero-day phishing threats. Artificial intelligence in PhishTitan algorithms and detection software ingests millions of email messages to identify the latest threats, so businesses don’t need to perform extensive updates to detection databases. Instead, PhishTitan software updates regularly as threat intelligence provides more information on the latest threats.

For businesses using Microsoft Office 365 with Outlook client software, PhishTitan integrates with Microsoft 365 to increase protection from malware and phishing attacks targeting the platform. Attackers know that many organizations work with MS 365, so they tailor phishing strategies to bypass Office 365 cybersecurity.  An integrated MS 365 security solution like PhishTitan acts as a safety net and additional protection against advanced, sophisticated phishing, including ransomware, malware injection, and new strategies.

Combine PhishTitan with SpamTitan, and your business dramatically reduces its risks of being a victim of email-based threats. WebTitan is also an additional web content filtering solution to block browsers from accessing malicious websites, which could be linked to a malicious email message. All TitanHQ products run in the cloud, so they take a lot of overhead and maintenance away from administrators and let them focus on other aspects of their job functions.

Find out more about PhishTitan, or start a free trial today.