Email is the single most effective and commonplace way of reaching someone in the business world today. Even as other methods of digital communication have come and gone over its 40-year history, email remains the backbone of business communications with 3.7 billion users worldwide collectively sending 269 billion messages every day.
But email’s ubiquity and popularity comes at a price: vulnerability. With the growing prevalence and success of targeted social engineering attacks, email continues to be a shockingly easy entry point for cybercriminals. In fact, the FBI’s 2017 Internet Crime Report indicates that business email compromise and phishing drive 48 percent of ALL internet crime-driven financial loss – more than all other business-related internet crime combined. Depending on their form, these targeted attacks are called by a number of names – spear phishing, business email compromise, impersonation, credential theft, etc. – and have a disproportionately large impact on an organization as they gain access to confidential information, intellectual property and in many circumstances, east-west migration attacks that go from email into core backend systems that contain customer data or even financial access.