Strengthening the security of critical email communications
Email Security
Email is as an essential infrastructure for business operations. While it is extremely convenient, it also presents a number of security challenges. By strengthening email security measures, organizations can protect themselves from information leaks, fraud, and other risks.
What Are Email Security Countermeasures?
Email is often used to exchange highly sensitive information. Email addresses themselves are considered personal data, and email is also one of the tools most frequently abused by attackers to deliver malware. For these reasons, robust security measures are required.
Organizations need to implement measures to protect against inbound threats such as business email compromise (BEC) using spoofed identities, and targeted attack emails with malware attachments, as well as measures to prevent misdirected emails so that important information is not sent to the wrong recipient.
Malware countermeasures in particular are critical for organizations of all sizes and industries. Once malware enters a system, the infected system can become a launchpad for attacks that may even impact business partners.
Asgent’s email security solutions provide comprehensive protection for both inbound and outbound communications across the organization.
We propose optimal mechanisms for email security solutions. Our solutions help you:
- Ransomware and Email Security
Ransomware has emerged as a rapidly growing cyber threat in recent years.
Ransomware is a form of malware that encrypts data stored on devices so that it cannot be used, then demands a ransom in exchange for restoring access. More recently, attacks have become even more malicious and sophisticated. For example, in so-called double extortion schemes, attackers first steal data before encrypting it, then threaten to publish the data if the victim does not pay.
One of the primary infection vectors for ransomware is email. Attackers distribute ransomware through email attachments or links embedded in email messages. The emails used in these attacks are increasingly sophisticated, making it difficult to identify them as malicious based on wording or sender information alone.
For these reasons, strengthening email security is also an effective measure from the perspective of ransomware protection.
Asgent’s Email Security Countermeasures
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Sanitizing Email Attachments
Many targeted attacks use clever techniques to disguise malicious emails as legitimate ones, infect endpoints with malware, and steal confidential information. Because many of these attacks include zero-day exploits using unknown malware, it is becoming extremely difficult to detect them with antivirus solutions alone.
Asgent’s solutions focus on the possibility that threats may be hidden in files and sanitize files in advance. This approach protects networks from both known and unknown malware threats, enabling safe exchange of documents and other files without impacting business efficiency. -
Detecting Threats Through Sandbox Emulation
To identify new malware for which no signatures are yet available, it is necessary to emulate their behavior in an isolated virtual environment, or sandbox. Asgent’s sandbox solutions can be deployed flexibly according to your environment, either as a cloud service or as dedicated on-premises appliances. -
Detecting Spoofed Emails (Business Email Compromise)
According to reports by the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA), business email compromise (BEC) was one of the most socially significant information security incidents in 2018. BEC involves fraudsters impersonating overseas business partners or company executives, sending fake emails to prompt fund transfers. Significant financial losses have been reported even within Japan.
Advanced phishing emails of this type often cannot be detected by conventional email security products. As a result, even large organizations that appear to have solid email security in place can find such emails bypassing existing defenses and reaching employees.
Asgent’s solutions leverages machine learning to analyze individual mailboxes. Based on this analysis, they detect impersonation tactics commonly used in BEC and warn recipients, helping to prevent damage caused by business email compromise. -
Automating Phishing Email Response
Today’s mass phishing email campaigns can easily bypass email gateways and lead to credential theft and malware infections. Even if an employee identifies a suspicious email, damage may occur while the security team is still working to identify other recipients. Asgent’s solutions automates this process: a single employee’s report triggered the immediate identification of other recipients, and the malicious email is removed from their mailboxes. This greatly reduces the time previously required from report to removal, as well as the workload on the security team. -
Preventing Email Misdelivery and Encrypting Attachments
Many organizations have internal rules requiring users to check the recipient, message content , and attachments before sending emails. However, simply defining rules does not eliminate misdirected emails. Similarly, more and more companies require encryption of attached files, but as long as people handle this manually, accidental mistakes cannot be completely prevented. By deploying appliances provided by Asgent, organization can ensure that recipients and other details are verified before sending, and attachments are automatically encrypted. This enables secure email transmission while minimizing the risk of misdelivery and human error.
