THREAT RISK
STOPPING INITIAL COMPROMISE
Director, Product Marketing, Proofpoint
Today's threat actors are increasingly targeting our people rather than our infrastructure. With email the number one threat vector, your people are under attack from phishing, malware, business email compromise (BEC), ransomware and much more.
To help fight these growing threats, we’ll delve into threat risk and impersonation risk – and the steps your organization can take to intervene as early as possible in the attack chain.
Before we can identify and block email threats, we first need to understand the concept of the attack chain. There are 3 key stages: 1 - Stop the initial compromise The first is stopping initial compromise by protecting people against threat and impersonation risks. Organizations must detect and block malicious emails before they’re delivered to your employees’ inboxes. Pre-delivery analysis detection allows security and IT teams to stop threats at the front door before they become a larger security issues - such as ransomware, malware or data exfiltration.
2 - Detect and prevent identity risks The second stage is identity protection. Here, cybercriminals look to identify and understand misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and identity gaps. Once identified, they can escalate their privileges and move seamlessly and silently across your network.
3 - Prevent data loss Finally, the third stage is preventing data loss. Once inside your organization, threat actors now have access to your critical company data and are staging its exfiltration. By implementing proactive and adaptive controls across your organization, you can prevent your sensitive data from being stolen and sold for financial gain.
There’s conventional thinking that attackers need to get it right once, while defenders need to get it right every time. If you look at the attack chain, attackers actually have to get it right multiple times across its length. Proofpoint’s strategy is to make it very difficult for threat actors at every stage. That’s fundamentally how we think about our strategy – how do we make it hard for threat actors as they work through the attack chain?
The shift from attacks on our infrastructure to attacks on our people is nothing new. But with more of us working outside the perimeters of the traditional office environment, cybercriminals have a broader and, in many cases, more vulnerable attack surface to aim at.
Increased cloud reliance and remote network access have made user identities incredibly valuable – something which has not gone unnoticed by today's threat actors. And the best way to compromise an identity is through the inbox.
While the tactics employed by threat actors once they are inside our defenses have evolved in recent years, their methods of entry remain largely unchanged. Ultimately, they want an email recipient to carry out an action, whether it is clicking a URL link, downloading an attachment or unwittily logging into a credential stealing website.
Cybercriminals' success relies on fatigue, distraction and isolation, so they will often target victims at times when they are more likely to engage. This could mean sending multiple email messages or an urgent and time sensitive request late on a Friday or during the holidays.
Emotion is a critical factor in successful phishing attacks. Threat actors will use everything the from a viral pandemic to an international refugee crisis to socially engineer credential theft in order to access your networks, systems and data.
ALMOST THREE QUARTERS OF ALL DATA BREACHES INVOLVE A HUMAN ELEMENT
EMAIL IS THE NUMBER ONE THREAT VECTOR
OF ALL CYBER ATTACKS INVOLVE A HUMAN ELEMENT
Email is a fundamental cornerstone of modern business, and it’s also the number one threat vector. Email threats are constantly changing and evolving, so effectively securing this vector from threats is daunting even for the biggest and most complex organizations.
Comprehensive visibility
Identifying who is under attack, how, by whom and for what objective, allows us to start assessing the risk people pose to your organization. Couple that with vulnerability and privilege information and we get a clear picture of where the bulk of our risk resides, allowing us to apply appropriate, relevant mitigation and controls.
Unparalleled efficacy
Organizations can detect more threats more accurately pre-delivery with AI-driven machine learning techniques and behavorial AI.
By leveraging unparalleled efficacy of our AI detection engines trained by trillions of data points, you can stay ahead of evolving threats with correlated intelligence across email, cloud, and network data.
Operational efficiency
Stopping threats before they reach your organization reduces the burden and workload on your security and IT teams while improving your people’s productivity.
Through automated remediation of malicious and unwanted emails post-delivery, your teams reduce investigation time and efforts while accelerating incident response.
The earlier you can detect and block email threats like BEC, malware and phishing, the safer your organization will be.
If you prevent the initial compromise, you stop threat actors from gaining a foothold in your organization and break the attack chain at the earliest opportunity.
Proofpoint Threat Protection is a set of solutions that protect your people from the threats that target them. With multiple controls across email, cloud, your employees and suppliers, it provides a comprehensive defense against phishing, malware, ransomware, (BEC) and supplier/ third-party threats.
Threat Protection gives you visibility into your attack surface, unparalleled detection, protection efficacy and positive operational efficiencies. With Threat Protection you’ll have the tools to see more, block more threats and remediate faster – stopping initial compromise and breaking the attack chain.
Email is the number one vector for cyberattacks today. What makes advanced email threats like business email compromise (BEC), ransomware, and credential phishing so successful is how well they target your users. To stop attacks you need to start with people.
Learn more
Learn more in our webinar – Stopping email attacks and initial compromise.
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