Securing Email

With best-of-breed tools from Sophos, IronLogix helps organizations safeguard critical communications.

Since it was introduced in 1971, email has become the de facto standard for business communication, supplanting the telephone and even personal meetings. It’s estimated that the typical office worker sends and receives more than 150 emails per day and spends roughly a quarter of the workweek reading, writing, deleting, sorting, searching and sending emails.

Unfortunately, malicious actors exploit email’s popularity in a variety of ways. It is believed that 90 percent or more of all cyberattacks are delivered via email. Hackers also target email systems to steal intellectual property, business plans, financial data and other sensitive information that users tend to store there. Analysts say spam email costs U.S. businesses more than $70 billion per year in lost productivity.

Although email security is usually a high priority in most organizations, it has always been difficult to achieve. It requires the integration of many different components, including software, servers, storage, operating systems, directories, filters, backup and archiving solutions. A typical email architecture might involve roughly 20 platform servers for archiving, antivirus and mobile device management.

Closing Security Gaps

Fragmented security measures further complicate things. As various threats evolved separately over the years, most organizations implemented individual point products such as anti-spam, message filters and data loss prevention (DLP) tools to address the most pressing needs of the moment. However, these disjointed tools contribute to a siloed approach to security that allows increasingly advanced threats to slip through the cracks.

Such security gaps are taking their toll on IT teams. In a recent survey of IT security professionals, 99 percent said they were stressed about email security, and 98 percent said they were frustrated with their existing email security measures. Another 91 percent admitted they had experienced email data loss.

As threats become more frequent and sophisticated, more organizations are looking to shift their email security burden to qualified managed services providers (MSPs) such as IronLogix. We have the staff and expertise necessary to implement layers of security measures to identify stealthy threats and prevent phishing, ransomware and other malicious emails from ever reaching users’ inboxes.

The IronLogix Advantage

The IronLogix team uses best-of-breed cybersecurity solutions from Sophos to protect our customers’ systems and data. These solutions include Sophos Email, a cloud email security solution delivered through Sophos Central’s single management console. It leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and mitigate a wide range of malicious email threats.

Here are some of the ways IronLogix leverages Sophos Email to safeguard customers:

• Identify Imposters. In business email compromise (BEC) attacks, threat actors impersonate executives or other trusted individuals via email to manipulate employees into taking actions that result in financial loss or data exposure. Sophos Email blocks these targeted impersonations using natural language processing (NLP). NLP algorithms can detect anomalies such as awkward phrasing, unusual word choices or improper sentence structure that may signal an impersonation attempt.
• Authenticate Email. Sophos Email scans all inbound messages for key phishing indicators using the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) authentication protocol. DMARC helps identify spoofed email messages and notifies email servers to delete those messages upon receipt, keeping them out of inboxes and preventing their propagation. It is built on two existing email authentication mechanisms, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standards. The unified solution enables domain owners to publish whitelists of approved senders, receive reports of senders attempting to use their domain names and block email from unapproved senders.
• Block Malware. Phishing emails often use altered URLs or deceptive web addresses to trick victims into opening them. Sophos Email includes a “Time-of-Click” feature that rewrites unknown URLs in the subject and body of inbound and outbound emails, redirecting the message to Sophos Email Security for analysis. If it is a malicious link, the email is blocked. Additionally, the feature tracks all blocked clicks and can identify “at-risk users” who receive high numbers of spoofed emails.
• Data Loss Prevention. DLP analyzes outbound emails and attachments, and alerts administrators if the sharing or transfer of data violates company policies. It helps prevent confidential information such as financial data, trade secrets, credit card numbers, tax documents and medical records from leaving the organization. In addition to helping companies protect their sensitive data, DLP also helps organizations remain compliant with major data privacy standards such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
• Encryption. Sophos Email uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt emails in transit. Additionally, it uses S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), a protocol that encrypts and digitally signs messages to ensure their confidentiality and integrity.
• Microsoft 365 Integration. Hundreds of millions of people now use the email client within the Microsoft 365 cloud platform. Sophos Email integrates directly with M365 and uses Microsoft Exchange Connector Services to analyze emails for phishing and advanced threats faster than ever.
• Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Integration. Sophos Email is fully integrated with Sophos MDR, and sends a variety of threat detections to the Sophos MDR team for deeper analysis. These detections include spam, impersonations, malware and account compromise.