Email has quickly become an integral part of people’s lives. But it's fast becoming expensive (and no, I don’t mean the daily flood of offers from your favourite shops).
Email is the new frontier for criminals capable of making money without leaving their house. They can fleece a person they’ve never met – from the other side of the globe.
Contrary to popular belief, cybercrime doesn’t always mean complicated hacks and months of careful planning.
In fact, more than 90% of all cyber attacks begin with a single email. Usually it takes the form of phishing, where a scam-artists tricks their victim into handing over private information such as their log-in and password for online banking.
This means the world is dealing with an influx of phishing emails designed to impersonate a real company or person. They’re landing in inboxes at unprecedented rates – some estimates say two thirds of the emails that circle the globe contain unwanted content such as spam – and most people struggle to tell the difference between a legitimate email and a fake.
One study found that 97% of people failed to identify each legitimate email in a series of 10 ‘real versus fake’ scenarios. On average, industry experts were only able to identify two-thirds of the fakes, the study found.
What does it all mean?
Here’s the scenario: telling good email from bad is difficult. And failing the test – and clicking a malicious link or handing over sensitive information – means the damage can be done in seconds. Think keystroke-recording malware, or costly ransomware.
Businesses around the world are watching the costs of cybercrime stack up.
Global cybercrime damages will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion last year, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.
Businesses are a key target because of the availability of money and reliance on data. Vulnerable organisations such as hospitals are frequently in cybercriminals’ sights because of their reliance on medical records, frequently outdated systems, and inability to afford shutdowns.
What should businesses do to protect themselves?
In the past, traditional antivirus helped protect businesses from cyber threats.
But today, that old approach can’t keep up. Currently, the number of known malware samples in the world surpasses 600 million. Speed is critical in protecting users from online threats,
Traditional antivirus providers are slow because they’re reliant on receiving copies of new threats, writing and deploying fixes known as signatures. For these to work, customers’ anti-virus software needs to install updates automatically or manually. The time this takes creates a window of vulnerability, and exposes end-users to malicious content including malware and ransomware.
Why savvy companies are moving their cybersecurity to email security specialists
Email security specialists using Artificial Intelligence and a multi-layered filtering processes mitigate the time lag – and window of exposure – associated with traditional antivirus.
Leading email security specialists such as MailGuard operate at the internet layer, filtering emails in milliseconds and blocking new threats such as phishing, spear-phishing and malicious links before they reach the inboxes of your staff.
Simple, seamless and activated within a few hours as a subscription service that requires no additional hardware or software and no administrative costs, MailGuard works with existing on-premise or cloud-based email providers such as Google or O365.
For just a couple of dollars per user per month, MailGuard’s Artificial Intelligence threat-detection engines predict and block new threats two-48 hours ahead of the market. Join our clients such as the AFL and Porsche in keeping your business safe from cybercriminals.
Interested in a free two-week trial and a comprehensive risk-profile report detailing your company’s vulnerabilities?
Start your free trial of MailGuard today.
