ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall (EPF): Scary Truth behind Phishing
ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall has been a huge success in it’s initial roll out and I wanted to take a moment to bring you up to speed on our progress and our end goal: to eliminate phishing and spear phishing as a threat to our clients. I do not intend to mince words here, this is the #1 threat out there – 90% of all compromises and breeches start with a phishing email. Stopping it, as an email security company, is our #1 job and I’m happy to report that initial results are stunning.
Little bit of a rewind: Until now the most popular way to fight phishing and spear phishing was through “education” – there is an entire cottage industry of supposed “phishing education”, testing, refreshers – and it all revolves around training people to hover over links in Outlook, what not to click, what to read. It will not surprise you that such “training” is practically worthless, but they say that a picture is worth a thousand words so here is our phishing book:
In the 48 hours following 4th of July weekend in United States, dangerous links in the email were clicked on over 770,000 times.
Without ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall, these links would have redirected our clients to dangerous sites that likely would have lead to a compromise or a security breach. So much for training.
What’s even more telling is that, even with our firewall in place, 164,000 people decided to proceed to a dangerous site anyhow.
If more than 1 out of 5 clicks in your email will take you somewhere dangerous, how well is your training performing?
With ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall we are enabling companies to setup policies, restrict access, provide intelligence as the user clicks — and we provide logging giving you an idea who attempted to trash your organizations network.
The scary truth behind phishing is that training is only useful in blatantly apparent cases – the kind that will NEVER even get to your inbox. Our SPAM filtering detects dangerous email content and filters it out before it has a chance to get to your Inbox. The stuff that we can flag as dangerous – thanks to user reporting, audits, and look-ahead scanning is far more sophisticated than anything we could pack into a SPAM filter – and it gives your users real intelligence on what they are about to click on. You cannot expect users to remember all their training and to be a web security analyst – their job is acting on the email.
Our job, is making sure the emails get to them clean and free of dangerous malware. Once they click on the links in the email – we are going one step ahead – and leveraging our industry relationships (data feeds and infosec sharing of dangerous content) to make sure you know exactly what you’re clicking on.
Phishing is immensely profitable and far more effective than any other form of hacking – the user literally clicks and gives the hacker the keys to the network – and our ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall helps remove the danger and reduces phishing to merely an annoyance.
The numbers speak for themselves.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO
ExchangeDefender
ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall – Report Issue
ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall continues to impress in terms of performance and user engagement – it’s catching dangerous content and keeping users safe from phishing attacks that often result in security compromises and breaches. Phishing accounts for over 90% of IT compromises, and as we’ve written before more than 1 out of 5 links our clients click on have lead them somewhere dangerous. With those numbers it’s clear to see why hackers are relying on phishing as the first and most effective form of attack – people will click on anything!!! And as intrusive as EPF seems to some (thank you for your feedback), our development team has been working overtime since the launch to make ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall out of the way when it should be, and in your face when something dangerous shows up.
The goal of ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall is to keep you safe from potentially dangerous sites and out of the way the rest of the time. You can keep up with our Dev fixes over at https://www.anythingdown.com and keep sending us your feedback. We love to hear it and we love improving the service so it can help keep you and your business safe. We also like to hear what you want us to add to the service that would make it more valuable. One such piece of feedback helped build a “Report Issue” feature:
If you click on something that you don’t recognize and you can’t tell what it is – DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK – we are here for you. Our security concierge will open the link in an isolated virtual environment and see what kind of data is being sent back-and-forth. You will get a response, generally within minutes, with either a thumbs up or thumbs down. How cool is that?
Keep the suggestions coming, we love making ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall the key part of your defense from phishing.
ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall User Benefits
ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall has had an outstanding first * X days * protecting our clients from phishing. While the roll-out of such a massive service is always going to be a challenge, we cannot be more thankful for our users and the relationship that has lead to tons of feedback, bug fixes, new features, and a meteoric rise in additional security that everyone enjoys.
Just as a reminder, ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall is an always-on phishing protection for email and web. As someone emails you phishing content, in hopes that you’d click on it and give away credentials and download malware, ExchangeDefender both helps keep that email sanitized and quarantined so that it never gets to your Inbox to be clicked on. But that’s not a fool-proof process, nor is it realtime – a site that was safe when the email was sent could have just been hacked and dangerous content uploaded – but we’ve got you protected there too: when you click on any suspicious site in ExchangeDefender scanned messages you will be directed to our firewall site, instead of directly to the suspicious content. Once you’re there, you are further protected by your corporate policies, and you’re given additional information that helps you determine if the site is dangerous or not. Once you’re sure you can either whitelist or blacklist the site and you’ll never be interrupted again.
How cool is that? Well, it’s so cool that during just the first two (2) days of use, ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall caught 770,000 clicks on suspicious sites that aren’t one of the top 5,000 Internet domains – and 164,000 requests proceeded to known dangerous stuff.
When you’re dealing with email and dangerous links, you need every bit of security and intelligence in your corner and ExchangeDefender Phishing Firewall delivers that:
It’s always on, always scanning your messages
There is nothing to configure, setup, install, or buy
It works on Outlook, Gmail, and any other email service
It protects you on your desktop, laptop, tablet, and anywhere else you click on links
It gives you a database of known dangerous/suspicious sites
It protects you by isolating patterns/data from ExchangeDefender’s reputation table
It secures you by leveraging data-sharing relationships we have with the worlds largest security vendors
It logs your activity so you can backtrack and identify dangerous activity
It gives your business ability to setup custom policies and block/allow access as needed
It gives you control over which sites to whitelist and blacklist so you’re not interrupted
It learns what you click on and how so you don’t have to manage a whitelist
Most importantly, it gives you access to our Chief Security Officer infrastructure where you can Report an Issue and have our team help evaluate a potentially dangerous link.
Not only are we doing everything to keep you safe and secure online, we’re literally available in person to assist when necessary. We know that every feature/block isn’t going to be loved by everyone, we know that every change can grind some folks the wrong way, we know that it’s not going to be perfect – but we’re in your corner, we’re here for you, and keep on sending us feedback so we can build this into a security service everyone loves as much as ExchangeDefender.
Thank you for your business and have a SAFE day on the Internets :slightly_smiling_face: