The #1 Anti Spam Solution
In the modern business space, the vast majority of communication is done by email. This is of course, as it should be – email is an effective, traceable, and very capable vehicle for sending messages, pictures, reports, and a whole myriad of other files. Mailboxes can be shared, archived, multi-user managed, in the cloud or on-premises (though this is becoming increasingly rare), and are able to be set up to allow you to carry your business communications in your pocket, and view the same mails when you sit down at your desk.
Are Email Threats New?
We take all of this for granted now, but it’s been a long slog to get here, and anyone that has been using email since the early years probably remembers the pain of receiving those regular spam messages, opening up your email client to find ten, twenty, or more emails from some random senders, selling some or other snake-oil product, or requesting subscription to mailing lists, were flat-out mailing scams, or at worst contained malware. You’d then have to manually move the whole lot to Junk, and if you didn’t have an IT team, you probably had to go to the trouble of manually blocking the sender domain yourself. This spam was an unwelcome annoyance to have to regularly deal with, but people still needed and wanted to send email, so spam filters were developed to automatically scan incoming messages for tell-tale signs that they weren’t genuine inter-business communications.
The creation of the spam filter effectively kicked off an arms race, with the mail service providers and security companies on one side, and cybercriminals on the other. Email was where business took place, where personal and monetary data were shared, so in time, the security and filtering became more and more sophisticated.
In the years 2000-2010, although the development of cyber security and email filtering systems was rapid, it was but a sleeping tortoise compared to the nitrous-fuelled, rocket-powered, meteoric rise of spam and malware. New threats appeared every week, sometimes piggybacking other threats. Mail domains became warzones, with spam filters needing constant updates to deal with the ever-evolving threat of malware through spam, as well as other new routes of attack, such as address spoofing and phishing.
The Modern Email Threat Landscape
Fast forward, and as we enter 2022, not a lot has changed; there is still a war of attrition going on between Cyber Security professionals and cybercriminals, but now the weapons have evolved; advanced email-borne attacks are now so sophisticated that a phishing mail can operate using a fake sender domain, exhibiting very little in the way of suspicious attributes, fooling the majority of mail hosts’ baked-in spam filters, and even getting past some off-the-shelf solutions. New phishing threats are the opener in a multi-step attack on networks, allowing the route for unsuspecting users to click on links to incredibly detailed and convincing fake-sites, as well as creating a conduit for malware code resulting in attacks such as ransomware infections, cryptojacking, and data-theft.
Some solutions deal with these threats in novel ways, but they are not always successful in fighting brand new attacks, called zero-day attacks, as they often rely on a database of known threats in order to profile potentially infected messages or attachments. SpamTitan Plus uses a sophisticated AI Predictive Analysis solution that looks at the behavioural features of threat messages and attachments, rather than matching up actual physical code against a database of known malware. This allows SpamTitan Plus to effectively scan mail-borne malware and phishing threats as the carrier message is passing the filter, even zero-day threats.
URL Rewriting and Rerouting in Real Time
SpamTitan Plus rewrites and checks any embedded URL, and, if safe, will allow navigation to that location. If the URL is found not to be safe, then the user will be redirected to a blocking page, stopping any connection and eliminating the potential threat. This means that users won’t be redirected to a malicious web location if they accidentally click on a phishing link, they’ll only ever get as far as the filter due to the URL being rewritten.
This is great of course, as it means that there’s a shield between you and anything harmful, but some solutions can be somewhat overzealous in their analysis of potential threats, blocking legitimate links and attachments. SpamTitan Plus however, enjoys the lowest false-positive strike rate of any spam-filtering product on the market, meaning that less of the stuff that’s actually meant for your inbox gets stopped in error.
Get Yourself Protected
Easy to use, simple to integrate and very reasonably priced, SpamTitan Plus is the best choice for fortifying your mail service and keeping the cyber-nasties out of your organisation’s inboxes.
If you would like to discuss increasing your mail security, any of our other security offerings, or you need to refresh or review your overall IT strategy, get in touch with Pearce IT today.