Four Tips to Prevent Phishing

Introduction

Phishing attacks remain the single biggest cybersecurity threat your company faces today, with billions of new phishing emails sent out every day. Legacy solutions like Secure Email Gateways can’t keep up. Even the most advanced email security capabilities available with Office 365 and Google Workspace struggle to stop advanced attacks like Business Email Compromise, Account Takeover and VIP impersonation. So what can you do to help reduce your vulnerability to this type of attack?

1. Employee Education

Education increases the likelihood employees will discern attacks and report them to your company’s security teams before surrendering any information. If you don’t already, instruct your employees to hover over links to check for a Secure Socket Layer certificate, force them to regularly change their passwords, and encourage them to set unique passwords for each application they use. Besides these common safety measures, continuously update your employees on new tactics scammers are using to add an extra layer of protection to your business.

2. MFA/2FA

Deploying multi-factor authentication (MFA) or two-factor authentication (2FA) across your company is a great way to help fight back against phishing attacks.  When logging into a workplace application, MFA/2FA requires employees to provide their password and one or more codes sent via text or authenticator app to add an extra level of defense around sensitive information.

3. Mailbox Level Intelligence

To detect malicious emails with or without payloads, your email security solution must have the capacity to dynamically learn mailbox and communication habits. This will allow for the detection of anomalies based on email content, metadata and irregularities in end user behaviors. This works to improve trust and authentication of email communications, flagging only actual incidents and quarantining any threats in real-time.

4. AI-Powered Incident Response

Companies using legacy SEG technologies often have to manually sift through thousands upon thousands of emails and then triage attacks on a case-by-case basis. Given the speed and volume of phishing attacks, relying on humans to find and investigate each attack means your security team will never be able to catch up. Artificial intelligence dramatically speeds up this process by automatically identifying, analyzing and responding to attacks, freeing up your resources to work on other pressing projects.