Mimecast Enhances Its Email Threat Protection Services

By Richard Anderson

The email security solution provider Mimecast has announced enhancements have been made to its email and data security solutions to better protect users from the rapidly evolving threat landscape.

A recent Mimecast survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne, revealed businesses are now having to deal with a variety of different cyberthreats and the volume and frequency of attacks are increasing. 53% of companies taking part in the survey believe email-based threats will have a negative impact on their business over the course of the next 12 months.

Phishing attacks, and specifically impersonation attacks, have increased significantly in recent months. Impersonation attacks – such as Business Email Compromise scams – typically involve the impersonation of senior executives. Emails are sent from their email accounts to accounts and payroll staff to get employees in those departments to make fraudulent bank transfers. The HR department is also commonly targeted to fool employees into sending sensitive data such as W-2 Forms containing employees’ tax information.

These types of attacks are increasing in volume and frequency, although there has also been a marked increase in impersonation attacks involving third parties – the impersonation of trusted suppliers and contacts. The Mimecast/Vanson Bourne survey showed 40% of businesses have seen an increase in these external impersonation attacks over the past 12 months.

Mimecast has responded with a new solution that can help businesses detect and block these types of attacks. Impersonation Protect provides protection against supply chain impersonation attacks by protecting against the use of lookalike third-party domains.

These lookalike domains often transpose letters, although there has been a rise in the use of domains with Cyrillic letters, such as the use of the Cyrillic ‘a’ instead of the Western ‘a’ in a domain. By using this tactic, scammers can easily fool employees into clicking links in emails. Mimecast Impersonation Protect includes new algorithms to check for these types of impersonation attempts and blocks them before they cause harm.

The Impersonation Protect solution also includes new real-time data feeds, which help identify recently registered domains. These feeds come via Mimecast’s global threat intelligence network, Internal Email Protect.

“Internal Email Protect will constantly monitor and re-check the status of all file attachment “fingerprints” globally,” explains Mimecast. “If the security posture of a delivered file changes, the service is designed to quickly alert and update administrators, automatically or manually remediate attachment-based malware and will log incident actions.”

The new enhancements are scheduled to be made available in June 2018 through Mimecast’s cloud platform, Mime|OS.

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Richard Anderson

Richard Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of NetSec.news