How to Use SOPHOS Email Advanced to Prevent Email Phishing Attacks?

Australian businesses claim to have lost more than $7.2 million due to security breaches and phishing emails. Most of this loss is around $3.8 million because of sophisticated business email compromise scams. Scammers hack business email systems, impersonate emails and change the email sender to appear from a trusted source. The scammers then request to change the payment details so that the payment is done to the scammer instead of the intended business. The email scams are not just limited to huge corporate houses. The scammers even target the local sports club or community groups. No matter what size the business is, the truth is that such scams affect the bottom line of businesses.

How to Prevent Email Phishing Attacks?

To prevent such attacks, SOPHOS has made several arrangements which enable you to detect and even block these. Impersonation attacks are done from uncertain sources and hence are hard to combat and track down. The phishing emails doesn’t carry any malicious payload and are unidentifiable. They are often sent with the name of a trusted employee in the organisation and therefore it is almost next to impossible for any receiver to also identify. Also, the scammers launch this attack from a free emailing tool or use a domain name which is quite similar to any corporate domain name.

The SOPHOS email advanced offers the required protection against phishing email attacks and also protect your organisation against other advanced attacks. With SOPHOS, you can strengthen the security infrastructure of your organisation and avoid any email phishing attacks.

• SOPHOS email advanced first compares the mail addresses or sender’s names with the names of commonly abused cloud service providers. The arrangement is such that the name of the sender is also checked with any of the VIPs or management personnel in the organisation.
• SOPHOS email advanced offers a simple arrangement where the VIPs of your organisation are first identified and then added for policy analysis.
• SOPHOS checks the header information and compares the display name with the email address from which the email was sent. The domain names are checked to verify if it’s a free domain, corporate lookalike or any VIP’s name is impersonated.

What More can you Do with SOPHOS Email Advanced?

• Identify VIPs

VIPs are those employees in the organisation who are in higher positions in the management and are quite likely to be impersonated. SOPHOS email advanced application allows you to create a list of 200 VIPs and ensure that their names are not used to send phishing emails. If you have an active directory synchronisation, then you can select the “Help me find VIPs” option and SOPHOS email advanced will look for people with the designations such as CEO, CFO, president, human resources director, basically the ones who are likely to be impersonated.

• Act on threats

SOPHOS email advanced protection enables your security team to stop the suspicious messages from landing in your team’s inbox. Also, the subject line is checked for security purposes and if there is any issue then the application will also banner the emails. A report “At Risk Users” can be extracted which gives you visibility of the phishing threats. The reports provide detailed information such as how many attempts were made from phishing impersonations, which users are either blocked or warned from visiting malicious content. The report also gives you the number of phishing emails sent to a particular user so that you can know which user is particularly targeted. You also receive information such as the summary of phishing emails like who sent it and who replied to it.

• Protect superior phishing

With SOPHOS email advanced you can block or avoid the suspicious messages from entering your secured infrastructure. The application blocks the malicious URL and gives you the exact time when the URL containing the malicious content was clicked by any of your employees.

The Bottom Line

Furthermore, the users who have clicked on the malicious emails or URLs can be enrolled onto the training programs to improve awareness. However, you need to purchase a phish treat license to become eligible for the training. Email phishing is a deep concept and you need an expert’s help to get all the policies correctly implemented and strengthen your security infrastructure.

Exigo Tech being a SOPHOS partner is one of the ideal places to get advice and suggestions for securing your infrastructure and preventing it from all the malicious email phishing attacks. To meet one of our security experts, call 1300 EXIGOTECH (394 468) or drop an email at .