The Internet isn’t a safe place, and it isn’t getting any safer.
Due in large part to crimeware (malware designed to automate cyber crime), even the most inexperienced hacker can damage your business’s reputation and steal confidential company data.
Today’s cyber threats have increased in reach, source and damage done to businesses around the globe. These viruses advance and mutate quickly, or quietly lay dormant until your network defenses are down.
In Part 2 of this blog series, we touched on the topics of malware variants and what level of support is needed from your email security provider to keep zero-day spam and phishing scams at bay.
For the third installment in this series, we want to address concerns surrounding the multi-layered defence approach to achieve a true antivirus solution with the following questions:
Question 3: How many layers of defence does your supplier offer for antivirus protection?
When your business only has an on-premise antivirus solution, you only have one layer of protection. Best practices in antivirus protection, however, dictate a need for multiple layers of protection to truly mitigate the risk of cyber-attacks.
A static, one-dimensional, on-premise layer of defence requires constant updates, leaving windows of time for fast-break malware to sneak through until the updates are made. Adding email filtering to your on-premise solution offers extra layers of defence, but it’s likely your business is still open to unknown viruses or zero-day threats.
For total security, your email security provider should have triple layer anti-virus protection, while humans are simultaneously monitoring and scouring the Internet for new malware variants and blocking them in near real-time.
Question 4: Is your current email security provider proactive in alerting you to the status of your service?
Utilising a cloud email security service requires that you change your MX records to point to the vendor responsible for filtering your mail. Unfortunately, MX records mistakenly get redirected, and when the MX records no longer point in the right direction, the vendor is no longer filtering your email. This could happen due to the following reasons:
- Your domain expired without you even realising it (lack of notification)
- An employee mistakenly deletes or redirects the MX records not knowing the implications
- Your DNS provider had issues and reverted your MX records without your knowledge
Your email security provider should be monitoring your domains on a daily basis, working to identify if your MX records are no longer pointing to their email filtering service.
For the highest level of domain support, your email security provider should contact you when the state of your MX records change. If there was a change, this may alert you to an issue you didn’t even know about yet, so you can be proactive in fixing it. Without this insight into your MX records, you’ll be unaware if people are emailing you and getting bounce backs.
Stay tuned for our fourth and final installment of this blog series aimed at helping you determine if your email security provider is leaving your business vulnerable to cyber threats. We hope you’ve found the first three installments both educational and informative.
Ready to learn more about partnering with the right cloud email security provider to shield your business from cyber threats? Call +61 3 9694 4444 or email or call us to speak directly with a knowledgeable expert at MailGuard.
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