Email is the most common way hackers can access an organization’s network, steal or corrupt data and damage its reputation. Consequently, email security is becoming more critical than ever before.
SEGs help reduce the number of successful attacks by blocking malware, phishing, spam, and other unwanted email-borne threats before they reach recipients and cause harm to their devices or sensitive information. These gateways can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.
Malware and Virus Scanning
Malware and viruses are common causes of computer problems, such as unexpected system crashes or sudden shutdowns. These viruses are often spread through email, where criminals send phishing emails that trick you into clicking on a link that could download malware onto your device.
The threat of malware and virus infections on your computer is a genuine concern, as they can be difficult to remove. They can also harm your data and cause your computer to behave strangely, such as opening files without your permission or showing error messages.
A secure email gateway microsoft can help prevent these threats by scanning inbound and outbound mail for malicious content or attachments, detecting spammers, and protecting against phishing attacks. These solutions also offer spam filtering, authentication services, and email archiving capabilities to safeguard sensitive business information from being sent in breach of company policies or with malicious intent.
Depending on the features of the secure email gateway, it can be integrated with other software to provide additional protection against threats. These include web filtering tools to block access to dangerous websites, data loss prevention technology to protect sensitive information in outbound email messages, archiving solutions to safely store long-term emails, encryption tools to encrypt sensitive messages before sending them, and cloud security systems to protect your data in the cloud.
Content Filtering
Content filtering has become essential in preventing employees from visiting unproductive or harmful sites in the business world. It can be deployed as software on dedicated servers or network hardware appliances.
Internet firewalls, mail servers, routers, and domain name system (DNS) servers can all be used to block unwanted traffic. Many companies use a combination of these technologies to ensure that their network systems stay free from malware and other threats while allowing legitimate users access to the Internet.
Another way content filtering can protect business systems is by preventing social engineering and fraud attacks like phishing websites and emails. Phishing attacks often aim to steal sensitive data, including login credentials and personal information.
The best content filtering solutions identify phishing websites by their URL or content and prevent them from being accessed. In addition, they can also prevent unauthorized visits to sites with hateful or violent content that may compromise employee safety.
As employees work from more remote locations, content filters must be able to be distributed remotely and installed in various ways. These include client-side instructions for workers to establish their own, a distant installation by IT, or platforms that include built-in filters.
Sender Authentication
As a sender, you must be confident that your email is authenticated. This is especially important because forged sender addresses are often used in phishing and spam campaigns. To avoid this, you must ensure that the ‘From’ address on your emails matches your legitimate domain name and IP address.
The best way to do this is through email authentication, which allows servers to verify that the email is coming from a valid domain and is not from someone trying to spoof it. This can help prevent phishing scams and spoofing and protect against malicious machine-in-the-middle attacks.
For this reason, email authentication is a must for all legitimate businesses. Authentication methods include SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) can detect infected and malware-heavy emails before they reach the end user’s inbox. They can also detonate these malicious emails in a sandbox, rendering them useless and unusable.
Another critical function of SEGs is spam filtering, which reduces the amount of spam and unwanted emails that enter the mailbox. These functions are generally performed at the network level and do not affect the end user’s device or performance.
In addition to these security measures, SEGs provide robust scanning layers for URLs and attachments to prevent malware and ransomware from entering the system and damaging sensitive data. They also offer heuristics to enhance detection capabilities. Depending on the deployment, these features can be integrated with other security tools, such as sandboxing, to improve data protection further.
Sandboxing
Sandboxing is a computer security strategy that prevents malware from spreading through the Internet and damaging your host machine. It involves putting suspicious code in a secure environment that mimics a real-world working environment or the network your organization uses.
It’s an effective way to isolate dangerous code without compromising the host system’s resources. It’s also a common way to test new software before deploying it to production.
A sandbox can be a virtualized environment or a virtual machine (VM). The former is an emulated version of the host system that restricts access to files, hardware resources, and network connections. The latter is a VM that lets you run and examine programs in an isolated testing space.
Some sandboxes are designed to detect the presence of malicious code, while others are used for research or development. These programs are often automated, so they don’t require human interaction.
These programs may look for user interactions, such as scrolling to a particular part of a document or clicking on a button. They might also detect system characteristics such as CPU core count, digital system signatures, and installed programs.
Even if the sandbox fails to recognize a malicious program, it can protect data from being erased. It can also keep folders containing emails or web browser bookmarks intact.
