How to Protect Your Email

Now, we’ll look at the expectations for email security technology in 2019.

How to Protect Your Email

We’ve looked at the telltale signs of a phishing email, and attack prevention strategies. Now, we’ll look at the expectations for email security technology in 2019.Like in the past, a layered approach to security is critical in defending your organization from email-based attacks. There are several tried and tested email security capabilities that still matter today.For instance:

Spam defense must still be in place to keep unwanted email and malicious spam out of inboxes.

Email threat defense like malware and URL blocking capabilities are vital to block malware, spear phishing, ransomware, and cryptoming in attachments, along with URL intelligence to combat malicious links in emails.

Integrated sandboxing should happen automatically in the background for new files arriving in email to quickly understand if they are malicious.

However, it can’t be stressed enough that the threat landscape is constantly evolving, and malicious actors are always looking for new avenues to launch attacks.In addition to the tried and tested, the following security technologies can help combat this ever-shifting landscape:

More advanced phishing protections have emerged using machine learning to understand and authenticate email identities and behavioral relationships to block advanced phishing attacks.

DMARC domain protections can now be activated to protect a company’s brand by preventing attackers from using a legitimate corporate domain in phishing campaigns.

Message quarantine functionality is useful to hold a message while a file attachment is analyzed prior to either releasing a message to the recipient, removing the malicious attachment, or removing the message completely.

Email remediation helps if a file is detected as malicious after delivery to the recipient, allowing you to go back and quarantine the message with a malicious attachment from within a mailbox.

External email threat feeds in STIX are now commonly consumed by email security products, which is helpful should an organization want to consume a vertical-focused threat feed beyond the native threat intelligence in the product.

Email security integration with broader security portfolios is also becoming common to understand if advanced malware or messages in an environment may have been delivered to particular users or inboxes.

“Cisco is a Leader in the 2019 Forrester Wave for Enterprise Email Security, receiving the highest ratings for deployment options, attack protection and email authentication, performance and operations (including scalability and reliability), and technology leadership.”

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Email Security, Q2 2019