LATEST INTELLIGENCE
EMAIL SECURITY THREAT
REPORT 2020
4 KEY TRENDS FROM SPEAR PHISHING
TO CREDENTIALS THEFT
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tThe Email Threat Landscape
Email and collaboration platforms are the
connective tissue of most businesses and
organizations, where information is shared,
plans are hatched, and alliances formed. Yet as
a human-driven medium, email often represents
the ‘weakest link’ in an organization’s security
strategy. Indeed, 94% of cyber-threats originate
in the email environment.
While traditional gateway tools seek to filter out
malicious emails on entry, their reliance on lists
of ‘known-bad’ IPs, domains, and file hashes to
determine an email’s threat level is extremely
limiting. A rule-based approach can often identify
known spam and other low-hanging fruit, but it
fails to keep pace with attacker innovations.
Spear phishing, impersonation attacks, and
account takeovers, in particular, remain fruitful
ways that cyber-criminals can infiltrate an
organization. Increasingly targeted email attacks
of this kind, which overcome the limitations of
traditional defenses, are a significant challenge for
security teams today.
As Peter Firstbrook, VP Analyst at Gartner,
puts it: “Common controls, such as standard,
reputation-based, anti-spam, and signature-based
antivirus, are fine for widespread attacks and
scam campaigns, but they’re not good enough
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