In today’s cybersecurity landscape, many of the biggest threats to companies find their way into organizations through email. Today, we will tell you about Proofpoint, a security service that Crown Computers recommends to their clients for email and data protection.
Email, for better or for worse
Email is strange these days. Many people have the attitude that email has become so full of (often dangerous) junk that it is simply useless. While the wind is definitely blowing that direction, we still have to live with it for now. At the root of this problem is email’s fundamental openness, since it was designed to allow any public server on the internet to send and receive data to one another. It is still the Wild West of the internet in some ways, and a great deal of scams and compromises start with unsolicited email.
Years ago, it was common for companies to host their own email servers, but virtually everyone considers that a bad idea now. Companies like Microsoft and Google do a lot of work behind the scenes to make email more secure, sometimes blocking or filtering a little too heavily… but at least their platforms are usable. For corporate data and communications, though, extra layers of protection are necessary to keep dangerous emails out of your organization’s inboxes.
Proofpoint: more than a spam filter
Proofpoint is a service that helps improve email security above and beyond what Microsoft may do for Outlook 365, for example. Using more advanced tools like machine learning to analyze threats, they can better understand when something is a threat to your security. This type of threat analysis usually relies on recognizing threat actors’ and users’ patterns of behavior in real-time and can spot anything out of the ordinary as it happens.
Proofpoint can also help you become better at communicating about threats within your organization. This is because of what they call a people-centric approach: it’s designed to protect users through detecting threats, but also educating and giving reporting power to users to keep them involved in your organization’s security.
Defense Inside Your Organization
Another way that they keep people at the center of their approach is to identify those members of the organization that tend to be targeted more often by phishing emails and scams. This information is important because it allows you to tailor your protection to fit the attacks that target your users the most, as well as educate your users and help them to recognize attacks when they get through the spam filters. One great feature that helps your users identify risks is warning labels about senders or suspicious domains, where the tag is also a one-click reporting tool.
Proofpoint offers internal email defense as well, which uses different techniques to assess emails sent within the organization, and can detect whether or not a user has been compromised. Here’s a nightmare scenario that you may recognize from an earlier post: 1) Employee A has already clicked a bad link somewhere in an email, and was targeted with a Browser in the Browser Attack that tricked them into entering their email credentials on an attacker’s website; 2) Attacker uses these credentials to login to your organization’s email platform; 3) Attacker uses Employee A’s email address to ask Employee B for information or payment, which Employee B gives because the email is from a trusted source. Proofpoint’s multi-layered detection tools can help identify that the email is from an imposter even if it came from a trusted, legitimate account. Proofpoint can also provide more specific protection for communicating with your suppliers, making you less likely to be scammed by compromised accounts at other companies.
You can integrate Proofpoint’s services with your Office 365 account, so you don’t have to give up your current email platform to use the service. This will allow you to enjoy all of these email protections, as well as protect your cloud access, keep your email archive in compliance and meet any legal requirements necessary. The extra protection that you get from Proofpoint can save your company a lot of headaches and money by making it harder to compromise your company’s data.
-Written by Derek Jeppsen on Behalf of Sean Goss and Crown Computers Team