Email Phishing: Protecting Your Organization

Email phishing continues to be one of the most prevalent methods for cybersecurity attacks that lead to data breaches, according to the 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report from Verizon. It’s pervasive and does not discriminate. Organizations, small and large, must be vigilant. And while user training and awareness are integral parts to reducing email phishing incidents, having a best-in-class email protection solution is critical.

The State of Email Phishing

While cybercriminals are continually changing phishing tactics to lure more victims, we’re doing all we can to help administrators and users deflect and prevent these attacks. As they become more sophisticated, so must the tools and practices to detect them. Ensuring awareness of cybersecurity for your staff is just as important as the defensive approaches you take to reduce the number of phishing emails that actually make it into your network. So, what does optimal email protection look like? And how easy it is to implement?

Security Technology and Security Awareness Protect Your Business

A recent video with Ryan Barrett, SVP of Intermedia, highlights how Intermedia approaches security as a partnership between Intermedia and our customers and the role of security technology. Advanced email protection expands the protection of your email service and helps users identify and avoid potential phishing and malware threats.

The advanced email protection solution includes:

• Policy-based spam and malware blocking allow administrators to create flexible policies and use granular filtering from a simple security control panel.
• Anti-phishing and anti-spoofing protection that weeds out external threats, including impersonating trusted internal or known external senders.
• Malicious link protection that detects and neutralizes suspicious links when they arrive (LinkSafe™ point of click protection), and also defends against links that are designed to pass initial inspection and become threats later on (LinkSafe realtime URL scanning)
• Outbound scanning to protect against spreading malware, malicious links and spam
• Marketing (graymail) management to flag potential spam and prioritize inbound messages

Our solution is easy to configure. We take care of the state-of-the-art backend, while you simply use your control panel to turn on the security policies you want.

Layered Approach Meets the Need for Accuracy

The Intermedia email protection strategy was driven by the desire to provide the highest possible accuracy. Accuracy means the proper classification of what emails should be hitting your inbox and those that should be quarantined.

Alex Smith, VP of Product Security & Analytics and email protection expert, shared Intermedia’s approach to email phishing prevention. “Our email protection solution is a layered approach that uses best-of-breed engines to detect potentially dangerous emails,” Alex said.

The key difference in our email protection service is that we use multiple engines that have different detection approaches. This mixing and matching enables more accurate and reliable results. You can think of it as each engine checking the work of others. This “group” evaluation delivers a unified score on the email’s validity with near-zero false positives. “With defensive layering, we have high levels of confidence in classification. That’s the advantage of multi-engine approaches, and we also have the ability to bring in new engines as new approaches become promising. ” Alex added.

These advanced email protection capabilities are available for Microsoft 365. It’s a valuable add-on that fortifies your defense against email phishing.

Protecting Your Users: An Email Security Checklist

We’re here to help you safeguard your network from email phishing. Here are nine easy ways to do so, featured in our Phishing Guide.

1. Be aware of requests with high urgency requiring quick action.
2. If an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is.
3. Never give personal or financial information over email or text.
4. Think about whether you initiated the action.
5. Don’t click on links from messages that contain misspellings.

The Intermedia Security Tool Kit: Resources for You

To help you better understand security and email protection, we’ve developed the Intermedia Security Tool Kit. In our Security Tool Kit, you can find valuable information, including a security checklist that suggests best practices to protect yourself against cybersecurity attacks. You’ll also find datasheets and whitepapers to help you determine which security solutions are right for you to help you protect your business.

Craig Woods

Craig Woods is the Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia.