Trust your inbox once again.

What's the state of email today? It's time for a reality check

Remote work is here to stay. The rise of remote work has been accompanied by a skyrocketing increase in the use of collaboration tools. Although there’s an abundance of available digital communication and collaboration tools to choose from, email still holds a key position in private and corporate interactions.

The world’s most widely adopted email service is Microsoft Outlook, with around 400 million active mailboxes (Microsoft 2022). That makes it an alluring target for cyber criminals.

Email is still one of the largest attack vectors. According to Verizon, 23% of successful malware attacks were delivered by email in 2021. The numbers have been high for a while now and continue to highlight the importance of having a robust layer of defense for email. (Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2021)

Besides spreading malware, attackers use phishing attacks and social engineering to steal company credentials. This gives the attacker the means to access internal information, distribute malicious emails, and perform social engineering attacks – for instance, by posing as a company employee. Phishing is the dominant attack method, present in more than third of all breaches. Today’s attackers are especially likely to target cloud-based email servers (Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2021).

Email remains a key entry point for cyber criminals to infiltrate corporate systems, and today’s email threats are getting more and more sophisticated. Email providers’ built-in security measures only get you so far – in practice, they mostly filter out spam. Training staff is of course another solution, but anyone can make a human error. You also can’t control every click all the time.

I want a mediocre email security tool – said no one ever

For a buyer, the email security market is a tough one to navigate. Traditional security tools such as secure email gateways may help with known threats but lack the capability to detect never-before-seen zeroday attacks and stealthier maneuvers.

The Forrester Enterprise Email Security Wave™ (Q2 2021) evaluation highlights that organizations are increasingly moving away from secure email gateways in favor of cloud-native security capabilities. According to Forrester, cloud-native third-party solutions using API integrations are a “best-of-both-worlds” strategy.

Forrester also recommends to look for integration between security solutions. Integration between solutions makes it possible to link an endpoint detection with a specific phishing attack, a powerful weapon in the defender’s arsenal.

Microsoft does offer advanced security capabilities as part of its more expensive licenses – for example sandboxing technologies. However, these licenses are not the most cost-effective option out there.

You can have solid email security without overpaying for it

WithSecure™ Elements Collaboration Protection helps you rebuild trust with your inbox. It bolsters Microsoft 365’s built-in security capabilities across Outlook and other cloud applications in a cost-effective cloud-native manner.

You can stop even the most cunning cyber attacks by layering advanced email security capabilities. WithSecure™ Elements Collaboration Protection empowers you to ward off advanced phishing emails – leaving no room for human error.

  • You can detect malware and ransomware and malicious URLs 
  • You can detect if your inbox has been hijacked with malicious inbox rules such as forwarding incoming emails straight into the attacker’s hands or launching other abnormal processes.
  • You’ll get notified if your company email credentials have been breached, which ones and when, and if the sender is an impersonator.

At the solution’s core is WithSecure Security Cloud, a cloud-based threat analysis and detection service that utilizes real-time threat intelligence gathered from tens of millions of security sensors across the globe. Our analyst teams look out for new threats even before they hit our customers and fine-tune our algorithms relentlessly to keep our defenses many steps ahead. Whenever the solution spots something suspicious, but not recognized by Security Cloud, it runs and deeply analyzes it in an isolated sandbox environment, where malicious behavior can be safely detected, to prevent harmful content from entering your environment.

Become an email security pro with only minutes of training

Our solution is extremely light but packs a punch. It may be an additional layer, but there’s little extra admin work required. It’s so simple that our customers claim it only takes a few minutes to get familiar with the product.

  •  You get to do more with less – thanks to automation
  • Highly accurate detections ensure that there is no alert overload to slow you down
  • Seamless cloud-to-cloud integration, deployed in minutes – you don’t need any extra middleware or software
  • Hassle-free scalability –you can easily ramp up and down with flexible subscription plans and save time and effort when securing a shifting number of inboxes

WithSecure™ Elements Collaboration Protection is an integral security module of the unified cloud-based WithSecure™ Elements cyber security platform, extending your protection from endpoints to cloud services. You can effortlessly manage your core security capabilities through a single portal, with unified data across all components. With Collaboration Protection, you can remain situationally aware of your security status – from anywhere.

WithSecure™ Elements Collaboration Protection

Explore Microsoft 365 security solutions for comprehensive protection. Defend against advanced threats on all devices and collaboration tools.

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