Cybersecurity & Networking

Enterprise Strategy Group recently completed an interesting study where, rather than surveying IT buyers and practitioners as is normally the case, we targeted employees in non-IT roles like sales, human resources, marketing, and finance. This provided a view of how the typical worker thinks about technology and the impact it has on their professional life. While a lot of the survey focused on end-user focused processes and technologies (mobile devices, applications, voice assistants), respondents were also asked for their perspectives on cybersecurity.

The cybersecurity results are reviewed in detail in this ESG Brief, but some of the high level takeaways included:

• Threats are exacerbated by risky employee behavior – between one in five and one third of employees report downloading personal applications to work devices, sharing sensitive information on public Wi-Fi networks, or disabling/removing AV software. The numbers are even higher for certain types of workers (mobile, senior managers, younger). When cybersecurity best practices get in the way of productivity or convenience, workers will obviously cut corners.
• Passwords remain an issue – nearly three-quarters of workers report reusing passwords at least occasionally. This isn’t surprising due to device and application sprawl, but is still worrisome. Single sign-on/password manager technologies are at the top of the list for technologies that workers want to alleviate the frustrating and productivity draining process of managing multiple passwords.
• Awareness training is becoming more common, but is still not pervasive – 60% of workers report participating in required cybersecurity training, but only 43% said it was a recurring practice. Companies don’t want to burden their employees with unnecessarily or unproductive trainings. However, when done right, cyber awareness training can make an impactful difference. But this requires going past just checking the box and creating an iterative program of training and testing to focus on the most vulnerable vectors and employees.

Overall, my takeaway was that cybersecurity vendors need to spend more time on the user aspect of security. Accounting for the views of those that are on the top line will become increasingly important as cybersecurity continues to move into the mainstream. That’s happened within the IT department, but there’s still room to grow among the non-IT employee base.

The set of announcements at AWS’s annual re:Invent is always impressive, albeit a bit of a firehose for which AWS’s own Amazon Kinesis data streaming processing engine would be helpful. At last week’s AWS re:Invent, a seminal annual IT event only AWS can get away with scheduling the week after Thanksgiving, the company announced a number of important security capabilities, some small, some big, all customer-driven. Thematically, in addition to a clear focus on identity and access management features designed to help customers rein in their AWS identities and secure S3 buckets, AWS is clearly focused on enabling enterprise-class use cases. (more…)

Getting Email Security Right Is More Important than Ever Before

With business email compromise racking up some of the largest financial theft associated with cyber-crime, and the relentless use of phishing as a means to trick users into handing over user credentials and other personal and sensitive data to bad actors, security organizations need to take a hard look at how their email security solutions are protecting against these issues.

Between the move to cloud-delivered email solutions and the general belief that email security has become commoditized, few are prioritizing email security as a top investment priority for the coming year. Yet there’s a ton of innovation happening in email security to help fight phishing, business email compromise (BEC) attacks, and leakage of the sensitive data that lives within the vast array of email mailboxes.

Email Continues as the Lifeblood of Communications

As much as I’d like to say that email plays less of a role in today’s business communications, it continues to be the lifeblood of daily communications for most workers. In addition to communication, most workers use email as their “uber-filing-system,” packing away emails received and sent, with little regard for any sensitive data that exists within them. Further, email addresses often act as core identifiers that get reused to access multiple applications, with 63% of ESG research respondents reporting that they use the same password to access multiple work devices and/or applications.

Traditional Email Security

For a long time, email security was about preventing the transport of malware, as attackers leveraged email to trick users into executing various types of malware attachments to compromise an endpoint. While secure email gateways (SEGs) are commonplace to prevent these kinds of attacks, SEGs often lack the ability to protect against more advanced, modern, email-borne attacks.

Email-borne Threats

Over the past few years, new types of harder-to-identify threats have emerged, continuing to leverage techniques that fool workers, convincing them to open malicious attachments, click on malicious links, and carry out malicious actions as instructed by impersonated senders. These activities facilitate credential theft, PII theft, and the fraudulent transfer of money into the hands of criminals.

Modern email-borne threats are facilitated by:

1. Malware payloads/attachments – leading to ransomware delivery and botnet drone delivery, and used as an entry for more complex attacks that start with simple reconnaissance and lateral movement.
2. Phishing attacks – leading to credential theft, PII theft, and business email compromise. Most include spoofed urls leading to fake copycat sites that capture credentials and other sensitive data (especially popular with Microsoft O365, Exchange, and OneDrive). Once stolen, credentials are often used in botnet-driven credential stuffing/replay attacks, counting on the reuse of the same username and password for multiple applications or websites.
3. Impersonation attacks (sender spoofing)
   • Impersonation of third-party, popular services like Dropbox, Office365, and others often catch people off guard. These attacks can involve multiple, related emails, in the form of a campaign, used to establish trust, but ultimately are used for phishing, BEC, or other fraudulent activities.
4. Business email compromise
   • BEC is often comprised of highly targeted, multi-step deceit, beginning with credential theft to provide context for criminals as they orchestrate believable conversations that ultimately lead to the fraudulent transfer of money and/or assets. Impersonating supply chain vendors is common here, as the transfer of large sums of money are commonplace.
5. Sensitive data leakage (intentional and unintentional)
   • Intentional – Typically includes the theft of intellectual property and other sensitive data. Email is often used as the transport, forwarding company emails to personal email accounts.
   • Unintentional – Email clients make it easy to misaddress emails that result in sending sensitive data to the wrong person. Also commonplace is accidentally sending the wrong attachment that may include sensitive data.
   • Credential theft – When credentials are stolen, impostors gain access to email accounts where they can search for and easily exfiltrate sensitive data by forwarding or auto-forwarding emails to other locations.

New Email Security Options

Fortunately, new security solutions are rapidly becoming available that monitor for behaviors that align with these modern attacks. The use of natural language processing is enabling security solutions to track expected communications and content behaviors, warning or stopping malicious activities. Email sender verification using DMARC, DKIM, and SPF are helping organizations limit impersonation attacks.

Next-gen email solutions from emerging security vendors like Valimail, Greathorn, Armorblox, and Abnormal Security together with market leaders like Mimecast, Proofpoint, Fortinet, Cisco, Symantec, and Trend Micro are leveraging these approaches to strengthen email security to protect against these plaguing email threats.

The threat landscape associated with email is rapidly changing, so security teams need to pay close attention to ensure that their email security solutions can keep up. Don’t assume that your current SEG has you covered. Help is out there but focus and attention to this evolving threat vector is required.