Cyber threats looming on\ small, medium, and large businesses

Technology is critical for businesses to respond to the changes we are facing today. It’s clear that we are now living in a transformed environment. What can be done digitally should now be done digitally. At the same time customers are attracted by the cybercriminals by jeopardizing customers' security at risk with phishing emails, malware, and email spoofing activities. It seems we are bringing easy food to the plates of the cyber criminals.

The average organization loses between 20 million dollar and 70 million dollar per year to email fraud. It's important to note that spoofing can also include violations of trademark rights and other intellectual property, causing significant damage to a company's reputation and credibility, in the following two ways:

· Your partners or esteemed customers may open a fake email and end up having their confidential information compromised. Cybercriminals can inject ransomware into their system through fake emails impersonating you, resulting in financial losses. Therefore, the next time they may hesitate to open your legitimate emails as well, causing them to lose trust in your brand.

· Recipients' email servers can flag your legitimate emails as spam and put them in the junk folder due to poor server reputation, drastically affecting your email deliverability.

Larger organizations dominate the headlines when it comes to cyber-crime, but it is the small and medium-sized enterprises that are becoming the primary targets and are bearing the brunt of most attacks. Smaller businesses have been hit with a few million cyber-attacks in this year, A report says, 56% of the companies in India reported that their IT costs have increased significantly to counter attacks in the past months – exactly two times the global average.

A report states, 72% of all cyberattacks begin with a malicious email, and 70% of all data breaches involve social engineering tactics to spoof corporate domains.

Each email client uses a specific application program interface (API) to send an email. Some applications allow the user to configure the sender address of an outgoing message from a drop-down menu of email addresses. However, this capability can also be accessed through scripts written in any language. Each open email message has a sender address that displays the address of the originating user's email application or service. By reconfiguring the application or service, an attacker can send an email on behalf of anyone.

Let's just say that it is now possible to send thousands of fake messages from an authentic email domain! Also, you don't have to be an expert programmer to use this script. Threat actors can edit the code to their liking and start sending a message using someone else's email domain. This is exactly how an email spoofing attack is perpetrated. Email spoofing paves the way for malware and ransomware to spread.

The real challenge for the organizations is that managing the protection of data across the company network and all of those new devices using a cluster of different solutions is expensive, time-consuming, and complicated. The lack of integration also creates gaps in the organization’s defences that cybercriminals are exploiting.