Threat actors are continuing their assault on businesses, individuals, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) this year, and email is still the top vector. As your clients turn to you for secure services, you need to make sure you have the right email security solution in place to protect your customers.

These days, hackers are gaining access to increasingly sophisticated tools to steal your usernames and passwords, and they know that people continue to use weak passwords for banking, utilities, and much more. In fact, even in 2024, did you know the word “password” is still among the top ten most common passwords?

For hackers, it’s a numbers game. Three billion phishing emails are sent every day, but all they need is for one of them to find a willing victim and do damage to your network. 

If you leave email security up to users, you’re in a world of trouble.

Jean Patrice Delia was an engineer at GE when he decided to steal company data and use trade secrets, pricing information, marketing data, and other documents and funnel them to his business partner to compete against GE. After an FBI investigation, Delia was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay $1.4 million in restitution. His business partner, Miguel Sernas, spent nearly a year in jail and was also ordered to pay $1.4 million. 

The pandemic has ushered in a paradigm shift in how businesses communicate with their customers. As organizations in healthcare, finance, and other highly regulated industries rely more heavily on email communication, their employees continue to send sensitive data such as medical and financial information through email. This makes email privacy more important than ever, and there are several ways to implement it, but with varying levels of complexity.

Online scams are nothing new -- but as email has evolved and improved, so have scammers and the messages they send. Nefarious emails, attachments and links now appear sophisticated and look legitimate, sometimes tricking even the most meticulous user.

G2 just released their Winter 2022 badges, and SecurityGateway™ for Email Servers continues to rank at the top of the Secure Email Gateway Software category.

If you're a key decision maker in healthcare, government, finance, or any other highly regulated industry, how trusting are you of your employees to protect your company's most valuable asset - its data? Now that businesses have had over a year to adjust to remote work, they've had to put more trust in employees when it comes to the handling of personally identifiable information (PII) of their customers. This has led to a number of data breaches, HIPAA & GDPR violations, and many other incidents. 

These key figures were reported earlier last year, and certainly by now these statistics have increased.

• Around 25% of email data breaches were caused by employees inappropriately sharing data
• Over 85% of employees are sending more emails as they continue to work from home
• About two-thirds of IT leaders have reported data leaks via email since the transition to remote work as a result of the pandemic

Data leaks can occur in many ways. The most common causes of data leaks are insider threats from within the business, hackers who have obtained access to compromised accounts, and users who fell victim to successful phishing and social engineering attacks.

The First Email Sent

Ray Tomlinson reportedly sent the first network message from computer to computer on October 29, 1971. His development work on the evolving ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), a government-funded network to connect various research facilities, would be the perfect environment for his experiment.