The Manipulation of the Human Factor: Email Security Explored
The mission of cybercriminals has largely remained the same – exploit vulnerabilities within an organisation for financial gain – but their methods continue to evolve to maximise their gains. Rather than targeting a business’ network or its endpoints in hopes of identifying a weakness, cybercriminals are capitalising on the trust inherent to human nature and deploying costly attacks to organisations through highly targeted emails.
They focus on the people in a business who have access to the information they want – and they target their victims through email, cloud apps, and social media. While up to 60 percent of IT budgets are focussed on defending the network, email remains the most lucrative path – and the easiest – for hackers to compromise the enterprise.
The latest thinking in cybersecurity is, therefore, to focus on the people, and there is a new generation of cybersecurity protection systems that create visibility of who in the organisation is most at risk. By protecting people, the company’s data and brand get shielded from advanced threats and compliance threats. Email remains the attack method of choice for hackers, and the numbers of threats from this vector are growing – email attacks are cheap to set up, campaigns are easy to run, and the paydays are lucrative, too.
