Tips for safe e-mail

Close the window of exposure

The threat landscape moves incredibly quickly these days with new threats being born every minute. Look for an e-mail security solution that offers real-time classification in order to catch the threats as they happen.

Don’t fall for social engineering scams

Cleverly wrapped social engineering scams use highly customized phishing e-mails and recently we’ve seen some diversification of social engineering in malicious spam. Spammers have abused big brand names to entice possible victims into clicking on URLs in messages. In May 2010 approximately 85% of all e-mail was spam (Source: Websense Security Labs) and in the last few months there were lures involving Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, Amazon, Adobe and even job applications. Along with malicious attachments, embedded malicious links in e-mail is a major threat, In May alone, 93% of spam included an embedded URL.

Beware the return of the attachment

In 2010, e-mails—often using popular topics—have re-emerged as a key medium for spreading files and delivering Trojans as attachments following an upsurge last year. Researchers have also seen increasingly sophisticated blended attacks that are difficult to close down, as well as simple malicious data stealing attachments and URLs.

Last month the ever-present threat, Zeus, sent out a clever new campaign of e-mail. This campaign took great care in tricking victims into downloading malware. These Zeus messages contained a PDF attachment as well as a link to a malicious executable file in the e-mail message. To make the messages more believable, they were made to look like forwarded mail from a security director within your company which explained that Adobe Reader needed to be updated.

Unify your security to stop converged threats

Guard against blended threats with an e-mail security solution that also takes intelligence from Web security and data security technology to achieve unparalleled visibility into both existing and emerging threats. Scammers use a combination of all three areas—e-mail, Web and data stealing—so it makes sense to have a unified security solution which takes all three areas into account. A combined unified solution provides one of the highest levels of e-mail protection from inbound and outbound e-mail security risks.

Keep your security up to date

Because of the dynamic nature of threats, real-time updates are critical. One of the easiest ways of managing this is to opt for Security-as-a-Service that provides the latest and greatest software and threat intelligence and ensures exceptional Web and e-mail security services without the cost and complexity of on-premise equipment.

Source: Websense