No matter how many safeguards an enterprise has in place, phishing emails will find a way to breach the security systems and appear in the inbox of employees. There has been a report that 3 billion fake emails are sent every day.
Almost 10% of the phishing emails pass through the various spam filters, while 4% of the phishing emails get opened. Eighty thousand victims fall prey to phishing emails each day. The statistics are scary, considering how a single click on a malicious link can make the entire enterprise vulnerable and prone to a phishing attack.
The attackers can steal billions of dollars and all the confidential information that would risk the others involved with the business. It would also destroy the reputation of the enterprise in the market.
So, to keep the enterprise secure at all times and ensure that no employee gets duped by a phishing attack, it is essential to block and filter phishing emails. But the question is, how do you block phishing emails? In this post, let us take a look at some methods that will help in effectively blocking phishing emails from harming the enterprise.
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Layered Approach
- Having robust anti-phishing email security is crucial for any enterprise. Having a firewall or spam filter or the built-in security features of the email system will not be enough to provide complete protection.
- Combining the enterprise policies, analyzing threats regularly, periodically training employees to detect suspicious emails, etc., will help in creating all-around cybersecurity.
- Each of these steps will act as an additional layer of security and make it difficult for the attackers to pass through undetected. The security system has to be such that a phishing email has to be detected at one layer or another before it harms the enterprise.
Evaluate Vulnerabilities
- One way to evaluate the weak or vulnerable areas of email security is to generate mock phishing emails and send them to employees.
- It will provide helpful insights in analyzing the extent to which the employees are aware of cyber threats and also offer pointers to training programs to understand phishing attacks.
Policies And Procedures
- Having restrictions on accessing the internet, advising employees against using the free Wi-Fi public network to access private and personal emails, asking employees to change passwords regularly, etc. will help in reducing the threat of phishing attacks.
- Also, recommending employees to verify personally before making payments to vendors downloading new software or attachments will alert the person in whose name the emails are being sent.
Employee Training
- Awareness training programs are essential to make sure that every employee is aware of various types of phishing threats. It will make them take a second look at the email if anything out of the ordinary catches their attention.
- Relying on employee training alone is not a feasible option. Employees open dozens of emails each day for various communication purposes. We cannot expect them to detect the minute of differences in emails.
- However, enterprises can see to it that the employees take phishing threats seriously and report any suspicious emails detected by the software.
Anti-Phishing Software
- When the traditional antivirus software programs are not being entirely successful in detecting and blocking phishing emails, it is essential to opt for a mail security system that uses the latest technology and artificial intelligence to detect fraudulent emails.
- Advanced technology, such as computer vision and machine learning, will not just depend on the existing database of fraudulent URLs to compare and detect suspicious emails. It will read the hidden code and scan the email for malicious content.
- When talking about how to block phishing emails, the anti-phishing software will analyze the flow of emails and create a behavioral pattern for each employee.
- The software knows and understands the email flow in an enterprise better than the employees and will alert the employees when there is an email from an external source claiming to be from a colleague or senior.
- Computer vision will ‘see’ the emails as humans do, but with greater accuracy, and detect the minute changes in the email addresses.
- Brand profiling is done to compare the suspicious emails to the genuine emails sent by the brands. It will analyze the empty logos read the hidden code in the emails, and prevent it from being executed.
- Anomaly detection algorithms identify the phishing emails before the traditional email security systems determine them.
It is crucial to choose an anti-phishing software that can be seamlessly integrated with any of the existing antivirus software and also works with all email systems, such as Office 365, G Suite, and Exchange.
IMAGE: UNSPLASH
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