Incredibly, spam emails account for 416.78 billion messages globally, per day. In fact, 85% of emails sent to organisations are spam related. Malware is often used for stealing sensitive information and can start by simply clicking on an email. Staff are enticed through the promise of reward “claim your prize!”, or by exploiting uncertainty “your account will be deactivated in 24 hours if you don’t confirm by clicking here and logging in”.
Here are a few tips to reduce and control the spam attacks on your organisation:
- Educate staff on the types of threats that are out there, and help them understand how to protect the organisation by responding appropriately.
- Utilise a comprehensive email security solution, like Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
- ATP includes Safe Attachments, Safe Links, anti-phishing policies and other integrations into the Microsoft cloud suite.
- Create a policy that staff are not to use their organisation email address to subscribe to information services or other online services unless they are directly related to their day to day work requirements.
- Implement a good firewall such as a Palo Alto Next Generation Firewall. The firewall classifies all traffic, including encrypted traffic, based on application, application function, user identity and content. You can create comprehensive, precise security policies, resulting in safe enablement of applications. Use global intelligence and automation triggered by analytics to find and stop attacks.
- Ensure adequate protections are configured in online tenancies and operating systems to stop automated files from running.
- Create a streamlined reporting mechanism for easily addressing spam and malicious emails that do get through, to mitigate further incidents.
