Enterprise email architecture is evolving, which is good news for cybercriminals. Legacy secure email gateways (SEGs) simply don't provide full protection from today’s evolving and costly attacks, and cloud-based email requires a new security approach. In contrast, the next generation of email security—the AI-powered Secure Email Cloud —gives organizations more comprehensive security and better...

Scammers know that impersonating a trusted government agency is an extremely effective way to trick or scare victims into handing over money, personal data, or sensitive information. In many cases, it’s all too easy for cybercriminals to use the agency’s own domains to send authentic-looking phishing emails to constituents and contractors. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security announced...

This post originally appeared on the Armadillo Blog and has been lightly edited for clarity. Most organisations have been successful in blocking malicious emails targeted at their employees, at least to some extent. Various on-premise and cloud providers exist to take care of anti-spam, anti-virus, reputation scores, and advanced features such as sandboxing of executables. As a service provider...

Business email compromise (BEC) fraud is a lucrative venture, and now that industry is expanding in a troubling way—by lowering the barrier to entry so that anyone with a couple hundred bucks can outsource a BEC attack. BEC criminals are organized, behaving in many ways like legitimate businesses . And just like any successful company in a growing industry, these criminals are looking to add...

Mergers and acquisitions can build your company's value overnight, but business email compromise (BEC) and data breaches can tear it down just as quickly. Too often, M&A announcements are followed by waves of BEC attacks against the companies involved, or by news that the target company was the victim of a data breach. To get the most value from a merger or acquisition, you need to know how to...

Over the past 6 months, 100% of Agari customer brands and more than 80% of their domains have been the target of consumer phishing or B2B phishing attacks impersonating their brand to commit fraud. While the cost of phishing attacks isn't always visible, there are very real costs to businesses in the form of email deliverability, brand value and fraud costs. The root cause of this problem is that...

After the typical malicious email attack is launched, its first victim will be compromised in under 4 minutes. Now, emerging, predictive models may point to new ways to neutralize that threat. Data science may soon be able to predict when the next email fraud attack will hit your company's inboxes. But why should we care? After all, what's the value of being able to predict these assaults? Is an...

Are you sending Google Calendar invites and not getting replies, or maybe your invitees tell you they tried to reply and it was blocked? Or maybe you are trying reply to Google Calendar invites and being blocked saying the mail is not accepted due to your domain's DMARC policy? This is an issue I have been seeing, so I did some digging and I have figured out what is going on. Before I get to the...

One of the things that often stumps even the most security conscious companies is knowing all the third-party email service providers they are working with. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible for these organizations to protect their customers from phishing attacks if they don’t even know who is sending legitimate email on their behalf. And this gets even more challenging when you...

With the surge of phishing and other advanced email attacks, you can’t be too careful when it comes to your inbound email messages. Beyond viewing the basic information provided, you should make it a habit of viewing and understanding your emails' full headers.

Ask any security professional what the number one pain point is within their organization, and chances are they’ll say ‘user behavior’…with ‘malware’ coming in as a very close second. And while these issues are very different on the surface, they do have one thing in common: both are often the cause of high-profile data breaches, largely in part to the increased use of spear phishing email...

In the last five years, we’ve all become far too familiar with it – hackers spoofing a company’s domain and therefore tarnishing the brand, bad actors attempting to infect our computers with malware, and criminals sending millions of spam messages. As if this isn’t enough, now there is a whole group of people working to outsmart companies AND their customers by using cousin domains to fool...

When you begin to work with DMARC, you realize just how important identifier alignment is. Identifier alignment forces the domains authenticated by SPF and DKIM to have a relationship to the "header From" domain. Header From Domain and the MailFrom domain are different? Yes, they are! Hearing these terms can confuse people. They sound like the same thing, but in reality they are not. The...

This is the second in a new ongoing series for us that gives you the tips and tricks you need for successful DMARC deployment . Read the previous tip here . DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is the successor to Yahoo DomainKeys. Both share similarities, however DKIM has the additional aspects of Cisco's Identified Internet Mail standard (IIM). The enhancements to this standard gives more security...

This is the start of a new ongoing series for us that gives you the tips and tricks you need for successful DMARC deployment. What does "PermError SPF Permanent Error: Too many DNS lookups" mean? There are several safeguards put in place with SPF . One of these is a limitation of DNS lookups to help ensure that you do not have timeout issues. SPF will evaluate only 10 DNS mechanism lookups in an...

One of the great things about a conference like BlackHat is that it gives people like me the opportunity to take a step back, get out of the specific back alleyways of cybersecurity that we usually inhabit, and take a broader, more holistic look at attack and defense. One concept that's been talked about for a while is the Cyber Kill Chain. It takes a military-theoretical approach to network asset...

The Benefits of Monitor Mode When a technology exists that can tell you if and when your domains are being spoofed (and by who), why would you not use it?! What is DMARC? DMARC was created to address some fundamental problems with existing email authentication technologies (SPF and DKIM). It provides feedback about your email authentication implementation and gives ISPs (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft...