Analysing Secured Email Gateway For Networks

Your email is the very first thing people did when the world when online in the 90s. It comes with very little bandwidth because technology allows for very little bandwidth. It was also so easy and inexpensive to send an email compared to the post office. There are some bulk emails that were sent by businesses that are advertising their products and services. In this article, I want to talk about a secured email gateway in networking. Follow me as we will look at that together in this article.

There are other mass emails that were sent by bad actors. This is also referred to as spam. It is the act of sending irrelevant and unsolicited messages to people without their consent.

Due to the fact that then an individual can send messages with little or no verification processes, it allows the act of sending spam emails to grow. In 1996, America Online coined the term Phishing to describe the act of sending emails purported to be coming from legitimate sources.

Phishing emails are also sent in order to trick individuals to reveal personal information. They can use the names of characters in your organization.

They can also purchase domain names that are similar to legitimate emails. They can trick you to click a link in the mail that contains malware. They always capitalized on the user’s naivety, carelessness or distractions. There is a need for businesses to educate their employees about phishing tactics.

While educating them may reduce phishing activities, it does not eliminate the threat. That is why something has to be done on the remote server and ISP level to stop phishing. Businesses and ISPs were mandated to stop spam emails.

They do this by identifying specific words in the header or body of messages. For example, the word cash is common in spam. The email server will block any email that contains the word Cash from being delivered.

ISP AND SPAM EMAIL

The ISPs also make use of spam filtering in order to stop spam emails. The ISP begin to implement filtering based on protocols being used. This led to the introduction of SPF. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) hardens your DNS servers and restricts who can send emails from your domain. SPF can prevent domain spoofing. It enables your mail server to determine when a message came from the domain that it uses.

SPF was later proposed as a standard in 2014. With every good measure introduced by ISP, the bad actors always introduce a countermeasure as well. Hackers for example can bypass authentication by using C@sh instead of Cash. Spamming and Phishing seem to be too lucrative for bad actors to give up easily. It was observed the number of phishing attacks has gone up astronomically. Phishing is so lucrative and it has cost over 500Million Dollars in damages to businesses.

During the first quarter of 2020, the Anti Phishing Working Group had 165,772 bad phishing sites. That is why a better defence is needed.

Anti-virus scanners were added to secure email gateway capabilities. Sandboxing and Threat Emulation. Even if employee education and spam filters fail, one of the new additions could detect and neutralize attacks. However, there are still cases of false positives during analysis.

This overwhelms the security team. Email security gateway has continued to evolve as threats evolve. Today, greater automation and Machine Learning have been added to secured email gateway, with little demand placed on Information Security Centres.

Data Loss Prevention is also available to detect and stop all the egress information that should not go out. Data loss prevention (DLP) makes sure that users do not send sensitive or critical information outside the corporate network.

The term describes software products that help a network administrator control the data that users can transfer. DLP products use business rules to classify and protect confidential and critical information so that unauthorized users cannot accidentally or maliciously share data, which would put the organization at risk.

For example, if an employee tried to forward a business email outside the corporate domain or upload a corporate file to a consumer cloud storage service like Dropbox, the employee would be denied permission. Fortinet has a product called FortiMAIL which has all the features mentioned. It can also integrate with other applications and servers.

Action Point
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I know you might agree with some of the points that I have raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

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