The Future of Email Protection: AI & Human

Account Takeover 

This is when cyber criminals target a secure account and then carry out various hacking techniques to gain access to the account. 

Once inside, they may use the account to access internal company files, sensitive data or valuable financial information. Or they may use it to gather additional information they can use to launch a subsequent and more damaging attack. 

HR is a popular target; hackers may sell employees’ personal data, for example. Finance is another top target; cyber criminals will use a senior executive’s account to send emails requesting payments ‘urgently’.

Spear Phishing

Spear phishing emails often don’t contain malicious links or attachments. 

That’s why traditional email security solutions can struggle to identify an attack. 

What’s more, the emails are more likely to land in an inbox – rather than spam or junk. Hackers often use free personal email services with relatively higher sender reputations. 

3 Ways Email Attacks Prey on Human Psychology

There’s something that these attack methods have in common. It’s the reason they’re so effective (and problematic for IT leaders). Namely, they all rely on the human element, playing on the following psychological triggers:

1) Seniority

The email appears to come from the CEO, from a domain similar to the real domain. The recipient is more likely to feel under pressure, and less likely to question its veracity. 

2) Urgency

There’s usually some form of urgency associated with these. The idea is to force the employee to make a judgment quickly, and less likely to pause to check with their security team. 

3) Context

Here’s how these attacks take on a new dimension, compared to a brute force attack, for example. The email may explain why the recipient needs to take action now, citing end-of-year bonuses or gift card for clients at Christmas.

Example

In an ideal world, a malicious email would be stopped from ever landing in your inbox. However, there will be times when this happens. The following should happen when an email lands in your inbox – at the very minimum:

• Virus scanning
• Spam scoring
• Real-time intent analysis
• URL link protection
• Reputation checks
• Full cloud backup and recovery of every email and file

A question of compliance

The introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has asked new questions of those responsible for corporate governance. Rather than being a finance issue, GDPR compliance is something that involves IT, HR, and the wider organisation. 

That’s why email protection also needs to come with proper forms of archiving that happens across your organisation. This way you demonstrate your business is operating in a compliant manner, while also ensuring you minimise any ongoing legal risk. Features should therefore include:

Secure cloud-based archiving for meeting evolving and stringent compliance requirements and address e-discovery requests. 

Email retention policies to ensure that important emails are safely archived to Barracuda’s secure cloud. Custom reports make it easy to demonstrate compliance with retention regulations and to defend deletion policies.

Next-generation protection

Traditional email gateways use static rules and policies—reputation analysis, blacklists, and malicious payloads—to determine if an email is malicious. 

However, socially engineered emails such as spear-phishing attacks are designed to evade these policy-based security measures.