Elly Yates-Roberts |
In the last three years, email attacks have caused businesses to lose US$26 billion. Research conducted by security technology provider Barracuda Networks has shown that this is partly because organisations spend an average of three and a half hours remediating each attack. But with automated incident response, these times can be cut down by 95%, and reduce funds lost to fraudulent activity.
For many organisations, finding, identifying and removing email threats is a slow and manual process that often takes too long and uses too many resources, giving attacks time to spread and cause more damage. Businesses rarely have the time and resources to handle each incident according to best practices, which forces them to prioritise which must be addressed first and leave the organisation, users, and data exposed.
Automated incident response solutions can make organisations more secure, limit damage, and save valuable time and resources for IT teams. It can identify all internal users who have received a malicious email and remove all instances of it, as well as deliver alerts to affected users to warn them about the threat.
Barracuda has offered three tips to improve incident response:
• Assess email vulnerabilities: scan your organisation’s inboxes to find malicious email and social engineering attacks that your email gateway missed. This will help you understand the vulnerabilities that exist in your email system and the scope of what needs to be investigated and remediated.
• Add spear-phishing protection: introducing an artificial intelligence-based protection against phishing and account takeover will help you block these types of threats more effectively and stay ahead of attackers by finding anomalies in real time.
• Automate incident response: an automated incident response solution will help you quickly clean up any threats you found in users’ inboxes during the email scan and make remediation more efficient for all messages going forward.