Phishing attacks are not uncommon to employees. A survey indicates that over 80 percent of the employees were confident that the traditional email gateways are good enough to protect their inboxes. That said, over 42 percent also disclosed that their company was one of the victims of phishing attacks. So, how do you ensure the safety of your employees’ inbox?

Provide A Pre-Delivery Protection

Preventing malicious emails from reaching your employees’ inbox is a sure way to fight against these indiscriminative and wide range attacks. However, this method may not be very effective when there are targeted attacks that are aimed at a particular employee. The filters must be setup judiciously so as to not block legitimate business emails. 

Post- Delivery Detection

Emails that are flagged as malicious by the users must be reviewed manually. Machine learning filters can also be programmed for reviews. This way, you will have the dual benefit of understanding the evolution of these phishing attacks.

Incident Response

You must now surely be looking for anti-phishing software for protecting your business on the inbox level. Latest software technology helps to analyze, contain or remove any malicious email from your employee’s inbox. Some softwareallows user-friendly plugins that facilitate instant reporting of suspicious emails. When the user reports on any malicious email, the report is sent to your software service provider for analysis. If the results are indeed malicious, appropriate actions are taken on the user inbox. This detected email is removed by the technician and a warning is sent all the other employees. Further investigations are conducted to suppress the possibility of future phishing attacks. 

Train Your Employees

Employees often the least resistance to attackers who are planning an exploit. Just one vulnerable user is sufficient for the attacker to make the breach. An unaware employee is an easy target for phishing attacks that span a large part of your organization. Their main aim is to steal the identities or credentials and compromise the employee’s laptop with malware. 

This problem can be solved by training your employees on phishing awareness, looking for anti-phishing software, and reinforcing the learning by intermittent checks. The employees must be given real instances of phishing attacks and must be equipped to spot and avoid such scams in the future.  

Engage In Active Defense

Even the best of employee training have certain thresholds. They can only prevent phishing attacks. Phishing attacks that are socially engineered operate on the fallible nature of humans. These attacks target qualities like kindness, helpfulness, generosity and other qualities that most employees would want to indulge themselves. 

The solution lies in an active defense that uses certain tools for proactively monitoring the email perimeter. Employees will not be able to click on a malicious email link if the monitoring tool learns of an attack. It automatically blacklists the domain and deletes the email from the inboxes of all the targets. 

Domain typosquatting notification service is another method used. One of the successful typosquatting technique is to identify the URL that an employee normally sees in an email, change a few characters and have it registered as a malicious domain. When the user clicks on this suspicious URL, he/she is not likely to notice such minor changes in domain names.  A typosquatting notification system will alert the technician that this particular domain has been registered as malicious and allow you to take preemptive actions. 

Phishing breaches have prompted many employers to implement strict email protocols. Protecting your employee's inbox implies that you are protecting confidential business data. Having the right measures in place can become a make-or-break point for your business success.