As we cement our shift to digital life, we must be prepared to handle the downsides that come with it. One of the biggest threats facing digital life is cyberattacks that can steal our personal information, impersonate us, and infringe on our privacy. These cyber-threats come in many forms, with phishing becoming a common one.
Read on as we tell you what's phishing and how you can protect your organization from these attacks through a combination of best practices and third-party tools.
Here is our list of the best phishing protection:
- Trustifi A comprehensive email security tool that's powered by AI to catch phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks. Ideal for small, midsize, and enterprise businesses operating in regulated industries.
- IRONSCALES An advanced email security platform that uses multi-layered and self-learning threat analysis mechanisms to protect your organizations from known and unknown threats.
- Abnormal Security An AI-based cloud email security platform that protects your organization from a wide range of cyberattacks.
- Proofpoint Essentials A complete security bundle designed to protect the systems of small and medium businesses.
- Barracuda Sentinel An all-encompassing tool that combines artificial intelligence with threat analysis to guard against phishing and other BEC attacks on your organization.
What is Phishing?
Phishing falls in a category of cyberattacks called social engineering attacks, as they are targeted attacks that are sent based on an individual's background. In phishing, the attacker sends an email to victims asking them to share sensitive information, send money to specific accounts, or do any other action that'll prove to be detrimental to the user and the organization. What makes these emails so dangerous is that the attacker impersonates a colleague, manager, friend, or relative while asking for a specific action.
Typically, attackers learn more about the victim from their social media profiles and other pieces of information they leave in the digital world. Based on this information, the attacker impersonates someone you know to gain your trust, so you would perform the asked action.
Now comes a big question. How do you identify a phishing email from a genuine one? Here's a look at the features of a phishing attack.
Features of a Phishing Attack
Any phishing email will have one or more of the following features.
- All phishing emails will create a sense of urgency. For example, an email could say that you have to submit your bank account details and passwords by today to continue to get your pension. This sense of urgency will make you take the action right away.
- The offers made in the email will be too good to be true, as they are designed to catch your attention.
- It will have misspelled domain names and fraudulent URL links that seem original but are not. For example, microsft.com, bankofamerca.com, etc.
- Some emails may contain attachments, that are nothing but malware or ransomware. As soon as you open the email, the malware gets installed in your system automatically.
- Many emails may seem suspicious or strange. For example, your manager asking you to send some sensitive information or a loved one asking for money suddenly.
If an email has any of the above-mentioned aspects, never open it, and never take any action based on it. As a practice, make sure to call or message your contact through other means to ensure that they sent the email.
As an organization, you must educate your employees on phishing attacks and how they can prudently avoid becoming a victim. Along with it, consider using third-party tools to get additional protection against phishing.
The Best Phishing Protection Tools
Let's jump to a detailed review of each tool to help you evaluate the right fit for your organization.
1. Trustifi
Trustifi is a comprehensive email security solution that uses AI-based detection to protect your organization from phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks. At the same time, it keeps your data safe and helps your organization to be compliant with leading standards such as HIPAA, PII, FINRA, and more.
Key Features:
Below are some important features of Trustifi.
- Inbound Shield: Inbound Shield is the AI-powered feature that protects your organization from phishing attacks. It uses a multi-layered scanning mechanism to deeply analyze any email and classify it as a malicious one. It can even detect gray and spam emails to route them accordingly. According to Trustifi, Inbound Shield can detect 93% of phishing and malware emails.
- Easy to Deploy: Trustifi's email solution is a cloud-based solution that's easy to deploy. It doesn't require any expensive investments or architectural changes. No complex setups are necessary, either, so you can install and set up the entire solution within minutes. Trustifi integrates well with your existing cloud email platform and can be up and running in under 10 minutes. It works well with Office 365 and Google Workspace as well.
- Encryption: Trustifi encrypts your sensitive data with AES-256 encryption, so your data becomes unreadable to unauthorized recipients. Also, this encryption mechanism helps you to stay compliant with many security standards like HIPAA and FINRA.
Overall, Trustifi is an easy-to-deploy and effective solution for protecting your organization from phishing, malware, ransomware, and other Business Email Compromise attacks.
Click here to get a quote.
2. IRONSCALES
IRONSCALES is a cloud-based email security platform that leverages AI and self-learning technologies to identify phishing emails and remediate them right away. It also works well to prevent BEC, ransomware, and other attacks. Plus, it comes with a convenient mobile app for both Android and iOS to help you access the incident response center from anywhere.
Key Features:
Let's see some important features to understand how IRONSCALES provides this overarching email security for you.
- Continuous Learning: A highlight of IRONSCALES is that it uses continuous learning to better understand your threat landscape. The obvious advantage of this feature is that it can identify unknown and zero-day threats using its advanced pattern-matching capabilities. It uses this learning to detect attacks and remediate them right away to prevent any negative impact on your organization's security.
- Wide-range of Attacks: IRONSCALES protects your organization from a wide range of email-based attacks such as phishing, whaling, spear phishing, internal attacks, and more. It also detects signature-based Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks in real-time. CEO frauds, supply chain attacks, employee impersonation, and invoice fraud are the other attacks it prevents.
- Automated Incident Response: IRONSCALES comes with an AI analyst called Themis. She mimics the work of real-world security analysts to quickly triage and respond to those emails flagged by employees. She can also group all the suspicious emails in the same incident and provide the necessary suggestions for quick decision-making. Also, Themis provides a percentage of confidence in detecting an attack, and this helps in better understanding the context of attacks.
- Education and Training: Along with AI and automated protection, IRONSCALES also offers enterprise training and awareness campaigns to educate your employees on phishing and how to prevent it. Plus, it also continuously tests your perimeter defenses by simulating real-world attacks, so you know how prepared your systems and personnel are to counter a phishing attack.
In all, IRONSCALES is a comprehensive email security solution that protects your organization from many kinds of cyberattacks. Its automated incident response and management are a big plus.
Click here to schedule a demo of IRONSCALES.
3. Abnormal Security
Abnormal Security is an AI-based cloud email security platform that protects your organization from phishing, malware, and other Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks. It integrates with your email application to identify anomalies and block them before they impact your organization.
Key Features:
Here's a look at the features of Abnormal Security.
- Highly Efficient: Abnormal Security is highly efficient in blocking most socially engineered emails and potential attacks, including those that bypass secure email gateways. It uses advanced behavior analysis and pattern-matching mechanisms to achieve such high levels of precision and efficiency.
- Easy to Deploy: Abnormal Security is easy to deploy, as no additional coding or configuration is required. Plus, it also integrates with all email solutions, so you can have this tool up and running within minutes. Undoubtedly, it saves a ton of time and effort as well.
- Extensive Monitoring: This tool monitors not just your emails, but also watches out for compromises on third-party vendors. In case of such known compromises, Abnormal Security blocks any malicious emails originating from these domains.
- Automated Incident Management: Abnormal Security automates the process of incident management. It triages and remediates malicious emails, and reports the same to you. Such automation requires no effort from your end and at the same time, provides complete visibility into what's happening within your network.
- Tracks User Behavior: Abnormal Security tracks user behavior based on baseline values and actions. This way it reports any suspicious user activity or behavior to the admin and can even remediate them right away. Needless to say, such features reduce the chances of insider attacks.
Overall, Abnormal Security takes a multi-pronged approach to email security and protects your organization against all forms of email attacks.
Click here to see a demo of Abnormal Security.
4. Proofpoint Essentials
Proofpoint Essentials is an enterprise-grade email security solution designed to meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. It's highly cost-effective and takes a simplified approach to email security.
Key Features:
Some of the features of Proofpoint Essentials are as follows.
- Highly Secure: Proofpoint Essentials is a highly secure option as it comes with advanced spam and phishing detection capabilities. It even has social media account protection to bring down the possibility of social engineering attacks. Further, it has a dynamic sandbox for safely opening attachments and URLs to prevent any malicious URLs from infecting your system.
- Granular Control: With Proofpoint Essentials, you have total visibility and control over your emails. This tool provides contextual information about the attacks that were thwarted and their root cause, so you can plug in these gaps right away. Robust filter rules and the option to quarantine users in case of an attack offer the visibility you need.
- No Maintenance: You don't have to install any hardware to access this tool and no maintenance efforts are required either, as the updates happen automatically. Its modern and intuitive interface also makes it easy to understand your threat landscape better.
- Encryption: Proofpoint Essentials allows you to encrypt emails before sending them, so unauthorized recipients can't read the contents of the email even if they manage to intercept the content. Undoubtedly, this feature adds another layer of security to your outbound email protection. In the process, it enhances your organization's data loss prevention capabilities.
At the same time, encryption doesn't impact productivity as both senders and recipients can read the email contents on their respective devices.
In all, Proofpoint Essentials is complete security protection that works best in small and medium organizations.
Click here to get started.
5. Barracuda Sentinel
Barracuda Sentinel is an all-encompassing tool that uses artificial intelligence, threat analysis, and user behavior to guard your emails from phishing, malware, and any other social engineering or cyberattack. It also integrates well with the Microsoft suite of products.
Key Features:
Some of the features of the Barracuda Sentinel are discussed below.
- Leverages AI: Barracuda Sentinel leverages the power of AI to detect and prevent attacks in real-time. It continuously learns the communication pattern of your organization and creates a baseline for the same. Any content, email, or communication that shows significant deviation from these established baselines is flagged.
- Real-time Remediation: Besides real-time identification, Sentinel also sends notifications and quarantines these malicious emails in real-time. Moreover, it identifies anomalies in the content and message header, and includes this information in the alerts and notifications, so your employees can quickly fix the problem.
- Domain Fraud Protection: Barracuda Sentinel performs DMARC authentication and analysis to protect your organization against domain spoofing and brand hijacking. Also, you can do a comprehensive analysis of the DMARC report to better understand the source of malicious emails. It even comes with an intuitive wizard for setting up the DMARC authentication.
- Cloud-Delivered: As Sentinel is a 100% cloud-delivered solution, it requires no additional setup or integration. Similarly, no specialized hardware or software is necessary for it to run. It integrates well with Office 365 and includes Microsoft Exchange Online Protection.
In all, Barracuda Sentinel comes with all the features you need to protect your organization from malicious emails.
Conclusion
To conclude, phishing attacks are common and yet, dangerous for any organization. It can result in identity thefts, injection of malware or ransomware into your organization's network, loss of sensitive data, and more. You can use a set of email best practices to reduce the frequency of phishing attacks, but given that they are social engineering attacks, discipline alone may not be enough. This is why it's important to use phishing protection tools that can offer an additional security layer to your organization's needs.
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