The Complexities of Email Security - And How to Choose Better Solutions
Email. Just the sheer volume of it is enough to inspire a person to want to run screaming in the other direction, but add on the constant and ever more sophisticated phishing, malware, and malicious spam of all types, and it’s simply too much. And yet, email remains the most effective channel for business communication, one that’s impossible to avoid. But there's good news! Just as cyber criminals have advanced their methods, email security solutions have also become more sophisticated. By unraveling the complexities of email security, you can arm yourself with essential strategies that ensure your communications remain private and your organization is protected.
This article will guide you through practical steps to elevate your email security, enabling you to navigate the digital landscape with confidence. Whether you're a seasoned techie or a reluctant user, you’ll discover actionable insights that will help you safeguard your inbox, keeping your data and peace of mind intact. Ready to take control of your email security? Let’s dive in and explore the essential methods to fortify your communications!
Why Email Security Is So Complex
1. Multifaceted Infrastructure
Email systems are inherently complex, involving multiple components: clients, servers, gateways, spam filters, relays, and intermediaries. Each component introduces potential vulnerabilities and points of failure. For example, an attacker might exploit a poorly configured server, a vulnerable client, or an outdated spam filter to gain unauthorized access or deliver malicious content.
2. Multiple Trusted Entities
Email communication relies on a chain of trust that spans various organizations and service providers. Messages often pass through several servers and networks before reaching their destination. Each intermediary, whether a filtering service, relay, or cloud provider, represents a potential point of vulnerability. While these services are designed to enhance security, they also require access to email content, raising concerns about data privacy and the potential for abuse.
3. Diverse Protocols and Standards
Email security depends on a patchwork of protocols: SMTP, IMAP, POP3, TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and more. The effectiveness of these protocols hinges on correct implementation and configuration across all parties involved. Misconfigurations, weak encryption, or expired certificates can undermine the entire security model, exposing communications to interception or tampering.
4. Human Factor
No matter how robust the technical controls, users remain a critical vulnerability. Phishing and social engineering attacks exploit human psychology, luring recipients into clicking malicious links, opening infected attachments, or disclosing sensitive information. What’s more, AI and other tools have empowered criminals to level their game up to an even more threatening perfection. At one time, malicious emails arrived with spelling and grammatical errors, but today, they’re more likely to be perfect. Cyber criminals combine email attacks with texts and calls, building elaborate social engineering campaigns that mimic the way we are all accustomed to be marketed to every day.
5. Evolving Threat Landscape
Attackers constantly adapt, employing new tactics such as business email compromise (BEC), zero-day exploits, and payload-less phishing. Traditional security tools often struggle to keep up, leaving organizations exposed to sophisticated and fast-moving threats.
Common Email Security Threats Defined
Phishing: Fake emails impersonating trusted sources to steal credentials or deliver malware. According to CISA (US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency) within the first 10 minutes of receiving a malicious email, 84% of employees took the bait by either replying with sensitive information or interacting with a spoofed link or attachment, a split-second error that can result in significant financial and reputational impact.
Malware and Ransomware: Malicious attachments or links that compromise endpoints and networks. An alarming advance in these attacks has been the recent emergence of state-sponsored attacks (hacks associated with foreign governments), and with the rapid adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), companies have vastly increased their digital vulnerabilities.
Business Email Compromise (BEC): Attackers impersonate executives or partners to trick employees into transferring money or sensitive data. BEC attacks often bypass traditional spam filters because they lack obvious malicious links or attachments; in many cases, cyber criminals break into real executive email accounts through stolen passwords, then send urgent emails from those executives requesting money or data. These attacks can amass unrecoverable losses very quickly and because they frequently use legitimate email accounts, conventional spam filters have little chance of stopping them.
Email Spoofing: Forged sender names and addresses to trick recipients into trusting fraudulent messages. You might be familiar with spoofing of the display name only: when an email display name appears as an actual colleague from your company, but when you check the actual email address, it is not from your company’s URL. But there are more sophisticated types of spoofing that can show legitimate or very similar domans.
Credential Harvesting: Phishing campaigns designed to steal login credentials, enabling deeper network compromise. A credential harvester is a malicious application that can be installed in a variety of ways, including via malware or phishing emails, which, once installed, allows the hacker to collect login credentials.
Email Bombing: Some email attacks are actually a cover for other kinds of attacks. Email bombing, flooding inboxes with thousands of emails, allows criminals to disrupt operations, divert attention while they attack via another method, and bury legitimate emails, such as security alerts or service tickets that might draw attention to an attack.
Why Legacy Solutions Fall Short
If you’re not evolving, you’re dying. That holds true with technology solutions and particularly with security solutions for a very basic reason: your competitors—and in the case of security, your competitors are the criminals—are always finding ways to evolve and improve. Email attack types, velocity, and sophistication have grown faster than the effectiveness of legacy solutions to combat them. For that reason, traditional secure email gateways (SEGs) and basic anti-spam filters are no longer sufficient.
Limited Detection: SEGs mainly detect known bad indicators (malicious attachments, suspicious links, untrusted domains). They struggle with novel, payload-less, or text-based attacks, and cannot reliably block sophisticated BEC or spoofing attempts.
Slow to Adapt: SEGs often rely on sampling and signature-based detection, which cannot keep pace with fast-moving, targeted attacks that may last only a few hours.
Operational Complexity: Managing and updating rules, policies, and configurations across a fragmented infrastructure is time-consuming and error-prone, increasing the risk of misconfigurations and gaps.
How to Choose the Right Email Security Solution
1. Embrace layered solutions.
There is no longer such a thing as a one-size-fits-all digital security solution. The attacks are too numerous and sophisticated to believe that a breach attempt can be avoided entirely, particularly when human error is always a potential factor. This means incorporating layered solutions. If a malicious email gets through your native email security, the AI-powered phishing detection solution you have in place can grab it. Robust employee cybersecurity training is critical and highly effective, but multifactor authentication provides another layer of protection in case an employee falls for a sophisticated trick and provides their login credentials to an attacker.
2. Seek Solutions with Key Capabilities
Look for solutions that offer comprehensive protection: not just spam filtering, but also advanced threat detection, encryption, DLP, authentication protocols, and user training. Consider whether you need a cloud-based solution, an on-premises device, or a hybrid approach. Leverage AI as well. Remember, effective solutions are the ones that evolve at pace, or better yet, ahead of, methods of attack. Solutions that make use of AI and machine learning are able to detect nuanced threats and zero-day attacks that native email security might miss.
3. Evaluate Detection and Research Capabilities
Choose providers with strong, adaptive detection capabilities and in-house threat research. Effective email security solutions integrate with global threat intelligence networks to ensure that they’re up to date on emerging threats, ensuring that they are blocking threats based on real-time updates instead of uploaded threat reports.
4. Consider Human-Centric Features
Select cybersecurity training solutions that your employees will actually use, perhaps even ones they might enjoy. Gamification, bite-sized micro-training that will educate without overwhelming, ongoing employee security scoring to encourage participation are all ways an effective training tool can produce real boosts in your team’s awareness and create a culture of cyber vigilance.
[BONUS: Download our checklist for implementing an effective security awareness training program here.]
5. Ensure Ease of Use
People will find workarounds for “solutions” that slow them down or irritate them. It’s unavoidable. Fortunately, the builders of security solutions have come to understand they must account for human nature, and there are many options that do not add unnecessary complexity and are easy to deploy, manage, and integrate with your existing infrastructure.
Conclusion: Filtering Your Options
All it takes is a quick visit to any search engine, and you will instantly discover that the biggest challenge with email security solutions is the vast numbers of them. Determining the right mix of solutions, a blend that delivers layers of protection for each specific type of vulnerability, while also aligning with your organization’s setup, needs, and risk profile, is not a simple task. And yet, while many people wish for it every day, email is not going away. As the central communication mode for your organization, email is here to stay, and it will continue to be an open door to bad actors if you allow it. Take advantage of the vast array of advanced email security solutions available and start protecting your business today. And as always, if JSCM Group can help, give us a call! We’re always here for you.