When it comes to beating a phishing attack, organizations are not only trying to beat the malicious message itself; they are also trying to beat time. That’s because the median time to click on phishing attacks is less than two minutes. That’s a very short window of time for something so simple as an email to cause catastrophic harm to your organization.

In order to beat the clock on phishing, organizations must implement the most effective anti-phishing solutions that can not only prevent and detect attacks, but also respond to them – preferably automatically and in real-time. Relying on IT staff, SOC teams or security consultants to handle and mitigate phishing attacks manually is inefficient and dangerous, only reducing the risk of phishing attacks by less than 5 percent.

Keeping this in mind, business leaders face unprecedented pressure to understand what the best investments are whfor phishing prevention and en it comes to email security and phishing prevention. Traditionally, this would include secure email gateways and phishing awareness training, but the sophistication of email phishing attacks, such as business email compromise (BEC), ransomware, and impersonation attacks, require stronger defenses.

The other issue is that many nefarious emails can sit in a mailbox unnoticed, just waiting for an unsuspected victim to clear out their messages and inadvertently click on it. Between email inundation, fatigue and the need to be up-to-date on everything, a lying-in-wait phishing message is all but guaranteed to inflict damage if it gets past the first line defenses, which is increasingly likely to occur.

Automated phishing prevention, detection and response is keyIn today’s email threat landscape, an automated phishing prevention, detection and response platform is the best investment because it reduces an organization’s risk from phishing attacks by more than 70 percent. That significant reduction is crucial when it comes to dealing with sophisticated attacks, such as homograph attacks and BEC, that can fool even the most seasoned cybersecurity veteran. Phishing also carries with it the risk of ransomware and malware infections, which can fundamentally shut down business operations for days and take weeks or months for continuity to regain normalcy. In some situations, the company may never recover and be forced out of business for good.

Derived from the data

This information doesn’t simply come from us, rather it represents the findings from Aberdeen, the premier market intelligence company, whose researchers recently published a new report using IRONSCALES’ data on simulated phishing attacks. The report lends much credibility and validation to IRONSCALES approach, as it reinforces how legacy prevention and detection email security measures no longer offer top protection for organizations.

In the report, Aberdeen further explains how time is one of the biggest factors when it comes to stopping phishing attacks and how automation is your mailbox’s best friend. As email phishing continues its reign of top attack vector, organizations will need to examine how they prevent and respond to attacks, according to the research firm.

Interested in reading Aberdeen’s full analysis? Click here to download the full report and then contact us to learn more about bringing our advanced phishing threat protection platform to your company – before the phish get their way.