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.

As a small business, what do you do when the big players in a mission-critical industry such as email don’t meet your business’ needs? You find a cost-effective, easy-to-use solution with great customer service – the kind developed by an industry expert. That’s how MDaemon Technologies came to be the email security provider for one specialty retailer in Texas.

Costs, Control, Ease of Use

In 2010, the 125 employees of a county in east Illinois -- and their hardworking IT director -- needed a robust, well-integrated email and collaboration solution that accommodated all the security and regulatory needs of county government. It was critical that the solution also be cost-effective and a breeze to use. The cost/benefit analysis left no doubt that MDaemon was the best solution for their needs.

“I’m a ‘one-man band’ supporting a small county government in the middle of nowhere,” the IT director said. “And we needed a much more robust email solution than was being provided by a local ISP.”

An IT director single-handedly supports 200 employees across ten facilities in a north Texas municipality, including the county courthouse, sheriff’s office, jail, probation offices, and volunteer fire and rescue. 

2020 has been a banner year for cybercriminals. They have stolen billions of dollars and data on billions of individuals by preying on widespread fear and uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A brief glance through my spam folder in MDaemon Webmail recently reminded me of the need for on-going education on the topic of phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams. I’d like to be able to tell you that the recent crush of cyberattacks on the healthcare sector, as exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has run its course – but then I’d be the one scamming. Looking through the latest Health IT Security monthly news archive turns up a long litany of phishing, ransomware, malware, spoofing, password theft and other data leaks, and server vulnerabilities that affect millions of patients and financial donors – and it’s not even the end of the month.

It's just a fact of life: If there's email, there will always be spam. If you’re involved with email security for a healthcare organization, 2020 is absolutely the year you can’t afford not to take this seriously. The healthcare sector has become a major target for cyberattacks during the COVID-19 pandemic, and these attacks are successful so often that Becker’s Hospital Review publishes a monthly update on healthcare provider malware, ransomware and phishing incidents. The most recent list includes:

Whether you run a multi-campus medical center or a small private practice, you’ve likely heard about cyber criminals who try to trick you and your employees into clicking a link or downloading an attachment so they can steal your organization’s money or protected data.