Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 41 | Page 73

//////////////// FEATURE: EMAIL SECURITY ERCRIMINALS PLAY INTO FEAR, CERTAINTY AND DOUBT (FUD) GH A NUMBER OF MECHANISMS E HAVE SINCE SEEN A VARIETY OF IMAGINATIVE ATTEMPTS TO ENGAGE RECIPIENTS. domains are bad, by or even millions of n successfully delivered. infrastructure is rs will abandon it and se and deploy a new le continues. Like ole’, these legacy e to hammer down mails – all the while ins are being created eparation for the next ‘Domain Game’ and efenders to win. t questions n to this problem is lem itself. It requires a the legacy approach g technology that peed and scale of ew technologies verage AI, seeking to n behind the email address. Rather than inspecting incoming traffic at the surface-level and asking binary questions, this paradigm shift away from this insufficient legacy approach asks the right questions: Not simply ‘are you malicious?’, but crucially: ‘do you belong?’ Informed by a nuanced understanding of the recipient, their peers and the organisation at large, every inbound, outbound and internal email is analysed in context, and is then re-analysed over and over again in light of evolving evidence. Asking the right questions and understanding the human invariably sets a far higher standard for acceptable catch rates with unknown threats on first encounter. This approach far outpaces traditional email defences which have proven to fail and leave companies and their employees vulnerable to malicious emails sitting in their inboxes. Rather than desperately bashing away at blacklisted domains and IP addresses in an ill-fated attempt to beat the attackers, we can change the game altogether, tilting the scales in favour of the defenders – securing our inboxes and our organisations at large. • INTELLIGENTCIO 37