An individual’s inbox is a mixture of personal and professional information that many organizations feel is safe with complex passwords and security questions.
Although helpful, the simple play on human emotions in emails becomes an easy target for threat actors. According to IBM Security X-Force, “phishing is the key initial access vector for security incidents…and underscores the need for organizations to focus on people, process, and technology.” There are multiple ways a hijacker can innovate phishing tactics. For example, last year, “3 in 5 attacks involved compromised attachments with one-third including URLs.”
This is a growing issue for downstream victims, public-facing applications, and valid accounts. Fortunately, there is a way to eliminate vulnerabilities in exploiting databases, networks, endpoint tracking, and identity access managers.
Avanan is an email security solution that leverages API to secure one’s inbox – particularly phishing. When considering threat actors manipulating emails through attachments and URLs, Avanan’s Zero-Phishing technology combats compromised messages and links before it reaches the inbox. This is done using malware inspection against a database of malicious files (AntiVirus) and runs through an integrated sandbox (Threat Emulation).
Zero-Phishing and AI technology isolates the email, embedded images, attachments, URLs, and even QR codes when a compromised message is sent. At this point, the technology checks patterns, signatures, domains, correlated info with the sender, keywords, brands, deceptive parts in URLs, and more.
Once thoroughly analyzed, the link and attachments are replaced with Avanan-protected URLs and attachments that redirect users and notify them that the message is protected. If it is benign, the user continues without interruption. If it is malicious, users are forwarded to a warning page, blocking hijackers’ bad intentions.
It is common that threat actors make phishing the yellow-brick road to compromise. However, Avanan’s email security solution continues exposing these threats to protect victims from falling into common traps while safely bringing them “home” to a reliable inbox.