The use of generative AI by cybercriminals to enhance the realism of phishing attacks and their adoption of evasive tactics has escalated the cybersecurity threat. The norm now includes sophisticated multi-part attacks that socially engineer employees, making spam and phishing the top threat to businesses worldwide.
The top threats identified by Microsoft in their Digital-Defense-Report-CISO point to a focus on human-centric attacks, including phishing and BEC (Business email compromise):
- Identity attacks (bruteforce attempts, sophisticated password spray attempts, and adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attacks).
- Ransomware targets small and medium size organizations.
- Targeted phishing attempts
- Business email compromise (BEC), which Microsoft states has “skyrocketed.”
Combatting the increasing volume and complexity of modern email-borne threats necessitates using advanced, specialist technologies. Anti-spam and antivirus email filtering solutions, with their robust spam and virus protection, are crucial in reducing your organization’s exposure to phishing, malware, and ransomware threats, providing a sense of security and protection.
Here, we look at why anti-spam and antivirus email filtering solutions are needed and the capabilities of the most advanced solutions.
Why conventional antivirus software is not enough
Conventional antivirus and anti-spam provide a first pass later of protection. However, these conventional tools have known security gaps. Over the last few decades, antivirus vendors and hackers have waged a war of attrition to outcompete each other. Hackers became adept at evasive tactics to avoid anti-malware detection as technology advanced. The most significant barrier to broad detection by conventional antivirus software is using signatures to identify malicious code. Malware code may contain a unique fingerprint or “signature.” Traditional antivirus software scans for these signatures to identify a potential malware infection. However, cybercriminals have found ways around this, creating malware that does not use signatures. Polymorphic malware is an example of evasive malicious software designed to continuously evade detection by changing its signature. Hackers use encryption to hide the malware from detection, then use a mutation engine to change the signature using new decryption routines. Polymorphic evasion is one tactic many attackers use to avoid detection by conventional antivirus software.
Hackers’ use of evasion tactics means new threats are challenging to detect. For example, zero-day threats are unlikely to be detected using conventional antivirus software. An analysis by Google states that “Threat actors are increasingly leveraging zero-days, often for evasion and persistence, and we don’t expect this activity to decrease anytime soon.”
The increasing use of advanced threats like zero-day and polymorphic malware requires a new approach. Advanced anti-spam and antivirus email filtering solutions stop known and zero-day threats at their source and prevent them from entering your network.
Advanced anti-spam and antivirus email filtering solutions achieve exceptional spam detection rates of more than 99.9% and identify 100% of inbound malware. The solutions can also be used to scan outbound emails to keep a company’s IP and brand reputation healthy and to avoid an IP address being blocklisted by a global blocklist agency – which could also have consequences for the accessibility of your website(s).
Challenges of spam filters
Conventional spam filters have significant challenges:
False positives
Conventional spam filters are known for generating false positives and identifying a legitimate email as spam. Emails identified as spam are typically quarantined, which negatively impacts productivity. Employees then miss essential emails, and the business is negatively impacted. Your brand could even be affected badly. As such, spam filters need to be fine-tuned to minimize false positives.
Lagging in an evolving threat landscape
The email threat landscape continually changes. Spammers aim to place spam in front of human beings, so they actively modify their emails to evade detection by spam filters and anti-phishing solutions. Basic spam filters, like Microsoft Office 365 EOP (Exchange Online Protection), could better detect evasive malware and complex spam and phishing emails. Advanced spam filters can predict emerging spam patterns by using AI-powered spam filters.
Cost
Some more advanced spam filters can be costly. For example, Microsoft’s advanced spam filtering with Office 365 requires additional expensive enterprise license costs to deploy Microsoft Defender. Spam filters such as SpamTitan have advanced features out-of-the-box. These dedicated AI-enabled spam filters are cost-effective and integrate seamlessly into Office 365.
Why do you need an advanced anti-spam or antivirus solution?
Around 160 billion spam emails are sent daily, a vast amount of spam that could end up in employees’ inboxes. Spam may seem innocuous and annoying, but some spam can be dangerous. Spam can be part of a social engineering scam that leads to significant financial losses. Almost half of all detected spam emails were associated with Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams. The CEO, HR, and IT are the most targeted.
Phishing emails are another scourge of business. In 2023, 85% of companies had experienced a phishing attack. Many phishing emails carry malware or indirectly cause a malware infection, including ransomware. Phishing is the initial attack vector in 41% of ransomware attacks.
As conventional anti-spam and antivirus software struggles to detect email-borne threats, companies must use advanced email anti-spam and antivirus filtering solutions.
How Advanced Anti-Spam and Antivirus Solutions Work
Advanced anti-spam and antivirus solutions can identify threats by applying intelligent and AI-enabled mechanisms above and beyond conventional email filtering solutions. Conventional email filtering solutions include features like real-time block lists, Sender Policy Frameworks and Recipient Verification Protocols, and tools to set your acceptable spam thresholds; an advanced anti-spam and antivirus solution includes capabilities as follows:
Greylisting
Greylisting (sometimes spelled graylisting) is an anti-spam process that controls spam by temporarily rejecting emails from unknown sources. Using greylisting for all incoming emails from unknown IP addresses are returned to their originating mail servers with a request for the email to be resent. All SMTP-compliant mail servers will defer rejected mail and resend it after a set period (usually five minutes). As servers sending spam are rarely SMTP compliant, they may not resend the rejected mail, so the spam is blocked.
SURBL (Spam URI RBL) Filtering
When a greylisted email is returned, it undergoes a series of secondary checks. One of these checks is known as SURBL filtering. The SURBL filter layer checks URLs contained within the body of the email to ensure they do not appear on a list of URLs registered in known spam emails. This process reduces the likelihood of an employee falling victim to a phishing attack.
Heuristic filter
Heuristic spam filters typically use intelligent technologies like AI algorithms to identify and predict patterns that signal spam. The system uses policies to score incoming and outgoing emails. An email will be identified as spam and blocked if it fits the score criteria. Heuristic filters are reactive to changing scenarios and phishing tactics, so they are ideal for modern evasive tactics.
Collaborative spam fingerprint checks
A vast corpus of “community intelligence” is used to build up a database of spam ‘fingerprints’ that can be fed back into the spam filter to block spam messages.
DMARC Authentication
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is an email authentication protocol that verifies that the sender of an email message is authorized to use a particular domain. It allows domain owners to protect their domains against abuse and is used by advanced anti-spam and antivirus solutions to detect and block email impersonation attacks.
Dual Antivirus Software Engines
Dual antivirus software engines use technology from two vendors to maximize the probability of identifying malware and viruses. Dual antivirus engines that are complimentary achieve a higher malware detection rate than just using a single engine. Advanced anti-spam and antivirus solutions typically use proprietary and open-source software in unison, or in the case of SpamTitan, two leading AV engines from Bitdefender and Clam AV.
Sandboxing
Conventional antivirus software uses signature-based detection. When a virus or malware variant is identified, its unique signature is added to a detection list. When that variant is reencountered, it will be blocked. Conventional AV software, however, is poor at protecting against zero-day threats, i.e., new malware and virus variants that are yet to be identified. This is where sandboxing adds benefit. Sandboxing provides an isolated environment where malicious attachments can be subjected to deep analysis to identify potential threat profiles, such as command and call server callbacks. As such, Sandboxing allows new threats to be identified and provides protection until AV lists are updated to include the signatures for new threats.
Implementing advanced Anti-Spam and Antivirus Solutions
Implementing an advanced anti-spam and antivirus solution does not usually require an advanced skill set. Most vendors understand that businesses want “set and forget” cloud-based security solutions that make configuring and managing their anti-spam and antivirus email filtering solutions as straightforward as possible.
Furthermore, in recent years, the trend has been to move away from high-maintenance solutions that protect each device individually. Modern and advanced anti-spam and antivirus email filtering solutions are administered from a centralized web-based portal, through which the filtering parameters can be synchronized with directory tools to set flexible user policies.
Can an MSP deliver AV and anti-spam solutions?
Many antivirus and anti-spam solutions can be delivered using a managed service provider (MSP). Using an MSP model for email security delivery helps small to medium-sized businesses in the following ways:
Cost-effective
Security solutions can be more cost-effective when delivered by an MSP that can negotiate a reasonable price on behalf of its clients. MSPs often offer subscription or monthly pricing that helps companies spread the cost of a solution.
Reduces the need for specialist in-house skills
Security staff is often scarce and costly. An MSP provides an extended team of skilled staff who ensure your antivirus and anti-spam software reflects the current state of the security landscape.
Reduces bandwidth needs of an in-house IT team
Offsetting a security solution’s deployment, management, and maintenance to an MSP allows your in-house IT team to focus on core business needs.
Provides best-of-breed solutions
MSPs can offer their clients best-of-breed enterprise-grade solutions to ensure you have the best security on the market at a great price.
Antivirus and anti-spam solutions, like SpamTitan and PhishTitan, are specifically designed to be delivered by an MSP. TitanHQ works alongside MSPs to create solutions that meet the tech stack needs of an MSP. TitanHQ solutions can be white-labeled to reflect an MSP’s brand. Our management consoles are also designed to make admin and management of multiple clients install simple, controllable, and fast.
Try TitanHQ’s Advanced Anti-Spam and Antivirus Solution
If you are concerned about the sheer volume of spam or malicious emails evading detection, you should explore using an advanced anti-spam and antivirus email filter. These filters enhance your network security and offer a low-maintenance solution, primarily when delivered by an MSP.
TitanHQ offers a free trial of our advanced anti-spam and antivirus solution, SpamTitan. The evaluation is a full-capability version of our solution. The solutions are free of charge for 14 days, allowing you to evaluate them in your environment.
TitanHQ’s sales team is available to answer any questions you have about advanced anti-spam and antivirus solutions. They can also discuss your security mechanisms to determine the most effective deployment option: a cloud-based solution or on-premises anti-spam software.
During the trial, our sales support technicians will help you find the optimum settings for your SpamTitan filter. Once the trial has ended, if you agree that the benefits of our anti-spam and antivirus solution are worth keeping, no further configuration of SpamTitan will be necessary. You’ll be set up to stop even the most persistent spam.
Contact TitanHQ for your free SpamTitan trial.
FAQs
What is a spam filter for business?
Unwanted and malicious emails are often called spam. Businesses may usually be swamped by spam, with employees’ inboxes filled with unwanted emails. This can impact productivity, as employees may miss important emails. Some spam emails can contain malware or carry social engineering messaging. Spam filters for businesses are used across the entire company, including remote workers and sometimes non-employees like consultants, to remove spam before it enters an inbox.
Why does an organization need spam and virus protection?
Spam and malicious emails are the most common methods of delivering malware, phishing login credentials, and other data or socially engineering employees. Companies need specialized email security software to filter out these malicious or unwanted emails before they cause damage to the organization. Without a robust and effective anti-spam/antivirus software solution, a company risks cyber-attacks like ransomware, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and data breaches.
How do advanced antivirus and anti-spam solutions work?
Conventional AV software has struggled to keep up with the adaptations used by cybercriminals to ensure their malicious content arrives in an employee’s inbox. Evasive malware, like polymorphic viruses, and cleverly generated emails mean that many conventional email security solutions cannot identify spam and malware. Modern, advanced, anti-spam and antivirus solutions use intelligent technologies, including AI technologies, machine learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP), to spot patterns of emerging threats and anomalous behavior associated with social engineering. Unlike conventional antivirus software, advanced AV solutions can predict emerging malware threats and identify zero-day attacks.
Can you switch off the greylisting process when you expect an important email?
Switching off the greylisting process is never recommended, as this is one of the most effective measures to prevent spam emails from previously unknown sources from evading detection. A safer solution is to add the sender of the critical email to an approved sender´s allowlist so that when the important email arrives, it is not automatically returned by the greylisting process.
Why might my outbound emails contain spam or viruses?
Emails can incorrectly be classified as spam when spam-like words frequently appear in their content. SpamTitan solutions can be configured to check for this issue, but more importantly, they check that a third party has not compromised users’ email accounts and is being used to distribute spam, phishing emails, or viruses from a “trusted source” (i.e., the corporate email account)
How do the filtering solutions treat spam emails and infected emails?
An organization can decide how the filtering solution treats spam and infected emails. While infected emails should be blocked, deleted, or quarantined by default, the option exists to relax spam confidence levels to permit the flagged delivery of spam-like emails in certain circumstances. Post-remediation can then take place as determined by policies.
What is an example of a spam email that an organization would allow?
Many organizations have websites with contact forms that potential leads are invited to complete and submit. Inquiries from online contact forms are delivered to the organization in the form of an email; however, if the spam confidence level is set too high, the email could be rejected due to misspellings, the incorrect use of English, or other spam-like signals. Adjustments to the anti-spam solution can be made to allow specific emails through.
Doesn’t this expose the organization to more spam and malware?
Not necessarily. SpamTitan´s anti-spam and antivirus email filtering solutions have granular controls that users, teams, departments, etc. can apply. This means an organization can relax spam confidence levels for sales and marketing departments and maintain higher standards elsewhere to protect the organization from spam and malware.
What are SpamTitan catch rates?
