FEATURE: EMAIL SECURITY
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With the cybersecurity
landscape in the Middle
East constantly evolving,
cybercriminals are upping
their game. Jeff Ogden, Vice
President Middle East and
India at Mimecast, tells us
bad actors are prepared to
play more of a waiting game
as they launch increasingly
sophisticated attacks.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks,
emails containing dangerous file types,
malware attachments and spam being
delivered to users’ inboxes from incumbent
email security systems.
The latest ESRA found a 269% increase
in BEC attacks, in comparison to the same
findings in the last quarter’s report. This
trend was also reflected in recent research,
the State of Email Security 2019 report,
which found that 85% of the 1,025 global
respondents experienced an impersonation
attack in 2018, with 73% of those victims
having experienced a direct business impact
– like financial, data or customer loss.
The ESRA report found 28,783,892 spam
emails, 28,808 malware attachments and
28,726 dangerous files types were all missed
by incumbent providers and delivered to
users’ inboxes, an overall false negative rate
of 11% of inspected emails.
In light of the report, Intelligent CIO spoke
to Jeff Ogden, Vice President Middle East
and India at Mimecast, about the state of
the cyber-landscape in the region.
What can you tell us about the
latest cyberthreats?
M
imecast, a leading email and
data security company, has
announced the availability
of its latest Email Security
Risk Assessment (ESRA). The quarterly
assessment is an aggregated report of
tests that measure the efficacy of widely
used email security systems. This quarter’s
ESRA report found a significant increase in
You get the odd targeted attack that’s
coming through into organisations and
sometimes it’s difficult to determine
where they come from. But I think in our
experience the simplest route remains
targeting people through email, targeting
individuals. Most attacks still start with
people being socially engineered.
So sometimes the outcome is difficult to
determine but well over 90% of attacks are
coming through email.
CYBERCRIMINALS
prepared to wait longer before
launching email attacks
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