Is Your Email Secure?
Updated: Apr 28
Email attacks, including phishing, impersonation, and insider threats, are increasing across the board and are likely to only increase in the future. Corporate management across America (and the world) are losing confidence in their organization’s ability to prevent negative impacts from these threats. A 2019 survey shows as many as 61% of respondents believe that suffering a negative business impact from an email attack is either likely or inevitable and 10% of respondents are resigned to the fact that their organizations will suffer a negative business impact from an email attack in 2019.
Phishing Attacks
Phishing attacks overall have become so prevalent that it is not a matter of if an organization will face them, but when. Nearly all of those responding to the 2019 survey indicated that they had experienced a phishing attack in the past year, with over half reporting that they had seen an increase in phishing and/or spear-phishing.
Business Email Compromise
News reports daily are reporting the significant impact of email impersonation attacks, or business email compromise (BEC). These breaches are reported so often that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the news of these attacks. In the past year, more than 67% of organizations said they saw impersonation attacks increase with 73% of victims reporting a direct loss resulting from the attack.
To add insult to injury, since these attacks tend to focus on corporate executives, they can be highly embarrassing for these high-level victims. Not only can these attacks be embossing for senior-level management, they can also impact relationships with business partners. When organizations choose to do business with other organizations they should be just as concerned about the partner organization’s security posture as they are their own. Spoofing of business partner email addresses is a common method of impersonation attack and has proven a successful strategy for criminals to obtain ill-gotten gain. These attacks pose a significant threat to organizations because the social engineering used makes them the most difficult types to control.
Ransomware
Studies have shown that ransomware attacks are up 26% in the past year with over half of those organizations encountering a ransomware attack that directly impacted operations. The impact of ransomware is not only monetary. Many organizations that experienced a ransomware attack experienced at least two days of downtime.
One of the core features of the Gold Comet solution is “whitelisting”. Whitelisting is defined as the practice of explicitly allowing some identified entities access to a privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. It is the reverse of blacklisting, which explicitly denies access. As implemented within the Gold Comet system, whitelisting is a process of controlling the accounts with whom you may communicate and virtually eliminates the risk of phishing, email spoofing, BEC attacks, and ransomware. If an email address is not whitelisted, emails are not delivered into the Gold Comet system, eliminating spam, spoofed email accounts, phishing (including spear-phishing), and Malware. Through our use of additional email security tools, even Malware sent from a whitelisted email address is identified and removed from incoming messages.
Our tag line at Gold Comet is “Total Privacy for your Online Communications“. Gold Comet was established with one thing in mind that is to bring privacy to your online communications. With our patented encryption process and our continual monitoring and enhancement of our cyber security posture, we provide the highest level of privacy protection available.