FINAL WORD
on malicious links (20%). Interestingly, 19%
cited criminal insider threats as a growing
concern for businesses.
Despite facing a fast-evolving threat
landscape, 75% of CISOs and CSOs in the
UAE admitted to training their employees
on cybersecurity best practices as little
as twice a year or less. Meanwhile, only
23% of organisations in the UAE train their
employees more than three times a year.
Organisations must ensure that their
employees are equipped with the knowledge
and the tools to defend against all manner
of threats. Employees at all levels must
understand how simple behaviours –
password reuse and mishandling of
data – can have significant, far-reaching
consequences.
In order to do that, companies need to
ensure they deploy regular and effective
security awareness training to educate
employees about best practices as well as
establish a people-centric strategy to defend
against threat actors’ unwavering focus on
compromising end users.
What should a robust email
security strategy look like?
The best email security strategies foster a
combination of technology and people. With
the constant uptick in phishing attacks, it’s
vital that businesses invest in modern email
security solutions to detect and block as
much of these threats as possible, removing
the guess work from users.
We recommend that organisations
prioritise a people-centric approach to
security that protects all parties (their
employees, customers and business
partners) against these threats, including
layered defences at the network edge, email
gateway, in the cloud and at the endpoint,
along with strong user education.
How is Proofpoint helping to
secure organisations?
Proofpoint invests 20% of revenue back into
R&D – one of the highest in the industry – to
ensure our products stay ahead of emerging
threat tactics.
Email is the preferred tactic for targeted
attacks, from fraudsters to large scale
cybercriminals to nation states. With
accurate malware detection and blocking,
coupled with credential phishing and email
fraud protection, Proofpoint Email Security
drastically reduces potential information loss
and financial consequences due to infection
and compromise.
Technical solutions and controls, while
important, are just one aspect of a broad and
deep defence. The cornerstone is regular,
comprehensive and adaptive employee
training. Proofpoint Security Awareness
Training is focused on engaging end users
and arming them against real-world attacks.
Proofpoint does this by using personalised
training based on our industry-leading threat
intelligence to reduce an organisation’s risk.
Can you provide insight into how
you work with channel partners to
deliver your solutions to end users?
Our channel partners and global customers
can look to us to provide an unmatched
level of insight into Very Attacked People
(VAPs) as well as to protect them and the
information they create from advanced
cyberattacks and compliance risks and
respond quickly when incidents occur.
In fact, one of the most prevalent
challenges continues to be related to the
protection of organisations’ Very Attacked
People (VAPs) with most employees
now working remotely and cyberattacks
becoming more sophisticated every day.
In light of the current pandemic,
Proofpoint is providing free access to
its Security Awareness Training
content for organisations to share with
employees, to ensure they are alert to the
latest cyberthreats.
To support remote workforces,
Proofpoint can also offer its cloud-delivered
secure remote access solution, Proofpoint
Meta, to help relieve the pressure around
scaling access to applications and strengthen
organisations’ cloud-based architecture.
The current pandemic has highlighted
the need for channel partners to continue to
leverage their relations with their customers
for a healthy partner ecosystem.
While organisations will encounter
many unique challenges during this time,
we at Proofpoint along with our channel
partners are on hand to support. Hence, we
recommend that security and IT teams keep
in close communications with their homebased
workforce as well as their partners. •
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