Our industry news section covers a broad range of news items of particular relevance to the cybersecurity industry and managed service providers (MSPs).
This section also included details of the latest white papers and research studies relating to malware, ransomware, phishing and data breaches. These articles provide some insight into the general state of cybersecurity, the industries currently most heavily targeted by cybercriminals, and figures and statistics for your own reports.
Hackers and scammers conduct massive spam campaigns designed to infect as many computers as possible. These attacks are random, using email addresses stolen in large data breaches such as the cyberattacks on LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and Yahoo. However, highly targeted attacks are increasing in frequency, with campaigns geared to specific industries. These industry-specific cyberattacks and spam and malware campaigns are detailed in this section, along with possible mitigations for reducing the risk of a successful attack.
This category is therefore of relevance to organizations in the education, healthcare, and financial services industries – the most common attacked industries according to recent security reports.
The articles contain information about current campaigns, spam email identifiers and details of the social engineering tactics used to fool end users and gain access to business networks. By following the advice in these articles, it may be possible to prevent similar attacks on your organization.
To protect their clients from phishing attacks, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) need to provide a comprehensive range of cybersecurity solutions. This post explores the risks from phishing and suggests some easy to implement anti-phishing solutions for MSPs to add to their security offerings.
Phishing is the Number One Cyber Threat Faced by SMBs
Phishing is the number one cyber threat faced by businesses and one of the hardest to defend against. All it takes is for an employee to respond to a single phishing email for a costly data breach to occur. The consequences for the company can be severe.
Email accounts contain a wide range of sensitive information. A phishing attack on a UnityPoint Health hospital in Des Moines, IA, in 2018 saw the protected health information of 1.4 million patients compromised. Also in 2018, a phishing attack on the Boys Town National Research Hospital saw one account compromised that contained the information of more than 105,300 patients. Phishing emails are also used to introduce malware and ransomware. These attacks can be even more damaging and costly to mitigate.
The healthcare industry is extensively targeted by phishers due to the high value of healthcare data, although all industry sectors are at risk. In response to the high number of cyberattacks and the current threat levels, the Trump administration recently launched the “Know the Risk, Raise your Shield” campaign. The campaign aims to raise awareness of the threat from phishing and other attack methods and encourage private businesses to do more to improve their defenses.
Phishing will continue to be a major threat to businesses for the foreseeable future. Attacks will continue because they require relatively little skill to conduct, phishing is highly effective, and attacks can be extremely lucrative.
Easy to Implement Anti-Phishing Solutions for MSPs
There is no single solution that will provide total protection against phishing attacks. Businesses need layered defenses, which provides an opportunity for MSPs. SMBs can struggle to implement effective defenses against phishing on their own and look to MSPs for assistance.
MSPs that can provide a comprehensive anti-phishing package will be able to protect their clients, prevent costly phishing attacks, and generate more business. Effective anti-phishing controls are also an easy sell. Given the cost of mitigating attacks, the package is likely to pay for itself. But what solutions should be included in MSPs anti-phishing offerings?
Listed below are three easy-to-implement anti-phishing solutions for MSPs to offer to their clients, either individually or part of an anti-phishing security package.
Advanced Spam Filtering
Advanced spam filtering solutions are essential. They block phishing emails on the server before they can be delivered to inboxes or employees’ spam folders. An advanced spam filter will block in excess of 99.9% of spam and malicious emails and by itself, is the single most important solution to implement.
SpamTitan is an ideal anti-phishing solution for MSPs. This cloud-based solution supports an unlimited number of domains, all of which can be protected through an easy to use interface. The solution supports per domain administrators, with each able to implement elements of their own email such as searches and the release of messages from the quarantine folder. Reports can be generated per domain and those reports can be scheduled and automatically sent to clients. The solution can be fully rebranded to take an MSP logo and color scheme, and the solution can be hosted in TitanHQ’s private cloud or within your own data center.
Security Awareness Training and Testing
While the majority of malicious emails will be blocked at source, a very small percentage may slip through the net. It is therefore essential for employees to be aware of the risks from phishing and to have the skills to identify potential phishing emails. MSPs can help their clients by providing a staff training program. Many security awareness training companies offer MSP programs to help manage training for clients and a platform to conduct phishing simulation exercises to test security awareness.
DNS-Based Web Filtering
Even with training, some employees may be fooled by phishing emails. This is to be expected, since many phishing campaigns use messages which are highly realistic and virtually indistinguishable from genuine emails. Spam filters will block malicious attachments, but a web filter offers protection from malicious hyperlinks that direct users to phishing websites.
A DNS-based web filter blocks attempts by employees to access phishing websites at the DNS-level, before any content is downloaded. When an employee clicks on a phishing email, they will be directed to a block screen rather than the phishing website. Being DNS-based, web filters are easy to implement and no appliances are required.
WebTitan is an ideal web filtering solution for MSPs. WebTitan can be configured in just a couple of minutes and can protect all clients from web-based phishing attacks, with the solution managed and controlled through a single easy-to-use interface. Reports can be automatically scheduled and sent to clients, and the solution is available in full white-label form ready for MSPs branding. A choice of hosting solutions is also offered, and the solution can connect with deployment, billing and management tools through APIs.
Key Product Features of SpamTitan and WebTitan for MSPs
Easy to manage: There is a low management overhead. SpamTitan and WebTitan are set and forget solution. We handle all the updates and are constantly protecting against new threats globally, in real-time.
Scalability: Regardless of your size you can deploy the solution within minutes. SpamTitan and WebTitan are scalable to thousands of users.
Extensive API: MSPs provided with API integration to provision customers through their own centralized management system; a growth-enabling licensing program, with usage-based pricing and monthly billing.
Hosting Options: SpamTitan and WebTitan can be deployed as a cloud based service hosted in the TitanHQ cloud, as a dedicated private cloud, or in the service provider’s own data center.
Extensive drill down reporting: Integration with Active Directory allows detailed end user reporting. Comprehensive reports can be created on demand or via the scheduled reporting options.
Support: World class support – we are renowned for our focus on supporting customers.
Tried & Tested: TitanHQ solutions are used by over 1500 Managed Service Providers worldwide.
Rebrandable: Rebrand the platform with your corporate logo and corporate colors to reinforce your brand or to resell it as a hosted service.
TitanSHIELD Program for MSPs
To make it as easy as possible for MSPs to incorporate our world class network security solutions into their service stacks, TitanHQ developed the TitanSHIELD program. The TitanShield MSP Program allows MSPs to take advantage of TitanHQ’s proven technology so that they can sell, implement and deliver our advanced network security solutions directly to their client base. Under the TitanSHIELD program you get the following benefits:
TitanSHIELD Benefits
Sales Enablement
Marketing
Partner Support
Private or Public Cloud deployment
Access to the Partner Portal
Dedicated Account Manager
White Label or Co-branding
Co-Branded Evaluation Site
Assigned Sales Engineer Support
API integration
Social Network participation
Access to Global Partner Program Hotline
Free 30-day evaluations
Joint PR
Access to Partner Knowledge Base
Product Discounts
Joint White Papers
Technical Support
Competitive upgrades
Partner Events and Conferences
24/7 Priority Technical Support
Tiered Deal Registration
TitanHQ Newsletter
5 a.m. to 5 p.m. (PST) Technical Support
Renewal Protection
Better Together Webinars
Online Technical Training and FAQs
Advanced Product Information
Partner Certificate – Sales and technical
Access to Partner Technical Knowledge Base
Competitive Information and Research
Sales Campaigns in a box
Not-for-Resale (NFR) Key
Public Relations Program and Customer Testimonials
Product Brochures and Sales Tools
TitanHQ Corporate Style Guide and Logo Usage
Partner Advisory Council Eligibility
TitanHQ Partner Welcome Kit
QTRLY Business Planning and Review
Access to TitanHQ’s MVP Rewards Program
Access to Partner Support
For further information on TitanHQ’s anti-phishing solutions for MSPs, contact the TitanHQ team today and enquire about joining the TitanSHIELD program.
The healthcare industry is one of the main targets for hackers, and while ransomware attacks have increased considerably in recent months and vulnerabilities in VPNs, RDP, and software solutions are frequently exploited, healthcare phishing attacks are far more common.
Phishing attacks on healthcare organizations allow threat actors to steal credentials to gain access to email accounts and other systems and steal highly sensitive data. Phishing emails are also used to deliver malware loaders such as the Emotet Trojan, which delivers other malware payloads such as the TrickBot banking Trojan, which in turn delivers ransomware.
Most cyberattacks start with a phishing email, so it is essential for healthcare organizations to ensure they implement safeguards to block these attacks and by doing so, prevent costly data breaches and regulatory fines.
The HHS’ Office for Civil Rights has imposed substantial fines on HIPAA-covered entities for data breaches that have started with a phishing email, including the two largest ever HIPAA fines issued to date – the $16 million financial penalty for Anthem Inc. for its 78.8 million-record data breach and the $6,850,000 penalty for Premera Blue Cross for its breach of the protected health information 10,466,692 individuals.
Tips to Prevent Healthcare Phishing Attacks…
Unfortunately, as far as phishing goes, there is no silver bullet. No single solution will provide total protection against healthcare phishing attacks. What is required is layered defenses – technical solutions providing overlapping layers of security – and adherence to tried and tested cybersecurity best practices. Some of the most important anti-phishing measures you can implemented to stop healthcare phishing attacks are detailed below:
Implement an Advanced Spam Filter
A spam filter is one of the most important technical controls to block phishing attacks and prevent malicious emails from reaching the inboxes of your employees. Advanced spam filters use a combination of blacklists of known malicious IPs, email header and content scanning, link analysis, anti-virus scans, sandboxing, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to detect and block email impersonation attacks, and AI and machine learning to identify zero-day phishing attacks.
You should implement an advanced spam filter and set rules to filter out all suspicious emails and reject malicious messages. Outbound scanning is also important to detect compromised email accounts that are being used to conduct further phishing attacks on your organization and vendors.
Use a Web Filter to Block the Web-Based Component of Phishing Attacks
Email filters are effective, but not infallible. New tactics, techniques, and procedures are commonly developed by threat actors to fool email security solutions. You may be able to block all malware and 99.9% or more of all malicious messages, but some messages are likely to sneak past your defenses.
A web filter provided additional protection by preventing your employees from visiting known malicious URLs that have been masked in phishing emails. Web filters block the web-based component of phishing attacks and malware downloads from the internet and work in tandem with spam filters to improve your security posture and block healthcare phishing attacks.
Implement Multi-Factor Authentication
A SANS Institute report suggests multi-factor authentication will block 99% of attempts by threat actors to use stolen credentials to remotely access email accounts, while Microsoft says MFA will stop more than 99.9% of email account attacks, yet many admins have not implemented multi-factor authentication. A recent survey by CoreView researchers suggests 78% of Microsoft 365 admins have not enabled MFA on their M365 accounts.
In the event of credentials being stolen – in a phishing attack or using brute force tactics – MFA should prevent those credentials from being used to remotely access your accounts.
Provide Regular Security Awareness Training
Technical measures are important for preventing healthcare phishing attacks but don’t forget the human element. Employees need to be trained how to recognize phishing emails and taught the correct response when a suspicious email is received. Security awareness training should also cover cybersecurity best practices.
To create a “security aware” culture in your organization, you need to provide regular security awareness training sessions, including an annual training session for all staff and more frequent shorter sessions or online CBT sessions throughout the year, making sure you keep the workforce aware of the latest threats. Not only will training help to prevent healthcare phishing attacks from succeeding, it is also a requirement for HIPAA compliance.
Conduct Phishing Simulation Exercises
Training is important, but so is testing. If you do not test your employees’ security knowledge, you will not know whether your training has been successful. There will always be employees that require more training than others, and through testing you will be able to identify the individuals that need more help.
Phishing simulation exercises are the best way to achieve this. You can find weak links in your workforce as well as your training program and ensure they are addressed.
Take Care with the Information You Make Available Online
In order to conduct a targeted phishing attacks on your organization, an attacker needs to know your email addresses. This information can often easily be found online in organizational charts and staff directories. Limiting the information you publish online will make it harder for email addresses to be harvested and used in attacks on your organization.
How to Reduce the Severity of Successful Healthcare Phishing Attacks
Healthcare phishing attacks are extremely common and often result in the exposure or theft of large amounts of protected health information. The Office for Civil Rights breach portal lists many email security breaches that have exposed the personal and health information of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of patients and health plan members.
When conducting a risk analysis, consider what would happen in the event of a breach and take steps to reduce the severity of a breach should your defenses be penetrated. It is a good best practice to implement an email archiving solution to send all emails to a secure, cloud archive to ensure that no email data is lost and to implement policies requiring emails containing PHI to be deleted from your mail system. In the event of a breach, the PHI exposed will be greatly reduced and so too will the breach costs.
By using an email archive, you will still be able to remain compliant and retain al email data, but you will be able to significantly reduce risk while improving the performance of your mail server.
Businesses had to suddenly adapt to a new way of working in 2020 due to COVID-19 and the countrywide lockdowns. In order to keep businesses running, many switched to remote working and allowed their employees to work from home. Even though employees are being encouraged to work from the office once again, many businesses have accepted that remote working, at least to some extent, is now here to stay.
When employees work remotely they are able to stay connected via email, instant messaging tools, and videoconferencing solutions. Many employers have even found that their employees have been more productive working from home. However, while employees are collaborating and connecting in new ways, remote working is not without its risks and many businesses are concerned about how they can protect their data and ensuring compliance in the new, remote working environment.
On Tuesday, September 22, 2020, TitanHQ is hosting a webinar to discuss the threat landscape with respect to remote working and will explain how you can ensure your email archiving and security are fit for purpose to maintain access to data for business and email continuity.
During the webinar TitanHQ experts James Clayton and Derek Higgins will cover the following topics:
The Current 2020 Technology Landscape
Security & Compliance in a time of Global Remote Working
Increase in Companies Relying Solely on Office 365
Protecting Business Critical Data
The Importance of Continuity in the Era of Remote Working
Attendees will also be introduced to the TitanHQ cloud email archiving solution, ArcTitan, including a live demo of the solution.
Webinar Information
Title: How to Ensure Business Continuity with Email Archiving for your Remote Workforce
One of the leading mid-market private equity investment firms in the United Kingdom has invested in TitanHQ. TitanHQ is headquartered in Galway, Ireland and is a fast-growing, global vendor of cloud-based cybersecurity solutions for SMBs, ISPs, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that serve the SMB market.
TitanHQ’s portfolio of solutions consists of SpamTitan Email Security, WebTitan Web Security, and ArcTitan Email Archiving. These solutions have been adopted by more than 8,500 businesses worldwide and are offered by approximately 2,500 MSPs in 150 countries.
TitanHQ, originally Copperfasten Technologies, was formed in 1999 and started life providing email security solutions to businesses in Ireland, but has since grown into a global company that provides SaaS solutions to companies including Pepsi, ViaSat, Virgin, O2, and Datto. The company has been recorded impressive growth and has become the leading provider of cloud-based security solutions to MSPs serving the SMB market, with an ARR of more than $15 million.
Livingbridge invests in companies with a value of up to £200 million and has an Enterprise 3 fund for investment in fast-growing companies up to the value of £50 million, with the latter fund used to invest in TitanHQ.
Livingbridge identified TitanHQ as a target for investment based on a proven track record at delivering powerful cloud-based SaaS solutions and being well positioned to benefit from strong, growing market momentum. The investment in TitanHQ will help accelerate the company’s ambitious growth plans through investment in people and product development.
TitanHQ received investment from Bill Mc Cabe’s Oyster Technology Investments at inception, and Oyster Technology Investments will continue to maintain a significant stake in the business.
“We are excited to be taking this next step in our growth journey with Livingbridge, a partner that understands the unique strengths of our business, shares our vision for success and has the experience and resources to help us to achieve it,” said Ronan Kavanagh, Chief Executive Officer of TitanHQ. “The recent pandemic and the growth of WFH initiatives has further highlighted the need for multiple layers of cyber security and our solutions form key pillars in this security strategy.”
“We are delighted to be partnering with TitanHQ, a uniquely positioned business with a well-differentiated product portfolio operating in a fast-growing, attractive market that is benefiting from strong macro tailwinds,” said Nick Holder, Director at Livingbridge. “There is a tremendous opportunity for Titan HQ to accelerate its growth trajectory over the coming years and we look forward to working closely with the management team to fulfil the company’s potential.”
The COVID19 pandemic has created challenges for all businesses which are trying their best to adapt to a new normal. Businesses are slowing opening up their offices once again but it will be a long time before a return to “business as usual.” In fact, massive changes have had to take place and life after lockdown is likely to be considerably different to life before it.
Managed Service Providers have also had to adapt, and many Channel companies have realized the massive changes due to the pandemic have brought a wealth of opportunities. They are not suffering as a result of the challenges but have adapted their operations and have gained considerable growth momentum. How have these forward-thinking MSPs turned the pandemic into profit? What have they done to grow their businesses in such difficult times?
On June 23, 2020, MSPs will have an opportunity to get answers to these questions and discover how they can grow their business and thrive during the pandemic and in a post-COVID-19 world.
In line with social distancing requirements, MVP GrowthFest is a virtual event where MSPs will have the opportunity to learn how obstacles that appear to be blocking progress are challenges that can easily be overcome.
MVP GrowthFest is a 3-hour event headlined by the 3-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) Award winning superstar, Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. Magic Johnson will be providing insights into the obstacles he has faced during his life and how he succeeded through a combination of talent, tenacity, and a strong commitment to the community.
The event will celebrate the energy that powers growth and the drive to thrive in uncertain times and MSPs will be treated to four powerhouse panels where a combined 15 Channel All-Stars will be providing valuable insights and practical steps to not only survive the pandemic but use it as an opportunity to grow and thrive.
TitanHQ’s Sales Director, Conor Madden, will be leading a security powerhouse panel and will explain how selling security is best achieved through education, and how this approach is essential for the modern-day MSP tech stack.
Currently, cyberattacks are occurring at unprecedented levels. Cyber actors having seized the opportunities COVID-19 has given them. MSPs can position their security stacks front and central and help businesses protect against these threats.
MSPs will naturally need the right solutions, and that is an area where TitanHQ can help, being the leading provider of cloud-based email and web security solutions to MSPs serving the SMB marketplace. TitanHQ solutions have been developed specifically to meet the needs of MSPs and are available at a price point that allows them to be packaged easily to significantly boost profits.
At the security powerhouse, attendees will also hear from:
Jon Murchison – CEO, BlackPoint Cyber
Kevin Lancaster – CEO, ID Agent & GM Security, Kaseya
Jessvin Thomas – President & CTO, SKOUT
Three further powerhouse sessions will be taking place at MVP GrowthFest giving MSPs further insights and assistance to grow their businesses and boost profits. There will also be $2,000 in prizes given out at the event.
Managing Through Change
Featuring:
Dan Wensley – CEO, Warranty Master
Joe Alapat – CEO & Founder, Liongard
Ryan Walsh – Chief Channel Officer, Pax8
Establishing Trust in the New Normal
Featuring:
Dave Goldie – Vice President of Channel, Cytracom
Ted Roller – Channel Chief, ConnectBooster
Andra Hedden – CMO, Marketopia
Frank DeBenedetto – Founder, AudIT
Leading & Accelerating through the Recovery
Featuring:
Tim Conkle – Founder, The 20
Dennis O’Connell – Vice President, Taylor Business Group
Worried about protecting remote workers from phishing, zero-day attacks, malware and dangerous websites?
On Thursday, May 21, TitanHQ will be hosting a webinar to explain how to better protect remote workers and their devices from attack. This webinar is ideal for current SpamTitan customers, prospective customers, Managed Service Providers and Small to Medium Enterprises.
We’ll show you why it’s vital to protect against the email and web component of cyberattacks – a web filter serves as an important, layer of security to block phishing attacks and malware and ransomware downloads.
Join Derek Higgins, Engineering Manger TitanHQ, Eddie Monaghan, Channel Manager TitanHQ, Marc Ludden, Strategic Alliance Manager TitanHQ and Kevin Hall, Senior Systems Engineer at Datapac on Thursday, May 21st @11am CDT.
We will discuss:
Covid-19 exploitation by cybercriminals in malicious cyber attacks
Meeting the challenge of protecting a fully distributed workforce
– Spotlight on WebTitan features and security layers for managing user security at multiple locations. Deep dive into the features and benefits of the latest version of WebTitan Security.
– The sophisticated nature of advanced persistent threats faced today and how WebTitan mitigates your risk against these threats.
Most cyberattacks have an email and web-based component –How WebTitan serves as a vitallayer of security to block phishing attacks, malware and ransomware downloads.
Why WebTitan is the leading web security option for the Managed Service Provider who service the SMB and SME market.
Webinar Details
Webinar – Keeping your Remote Workers TWICE as secure with SpamTitan & WebTitan
Blackpoint Cyber announced its Remote Reality LIVE conference, which will occur online April 8th and April 9th 2020.
The conference will focus on managed service providers (MSPs) and how they can stay secure, profitable, and resilient as the world increases remote operations during the COVID-19 pandemic – registration and attendance are free. The two-day conference will include sessions by former leaders of the United States’ government cyber security and intelligence communities as well as cyber security experts and business veterans from the MSP services and technology industry.
Blackpoint Cyber announces its virtual cyber security conference for MSPs – Remote Reality LIVE. Featuring a keynote from the former Acting Director of the CIA and sessions from tech giants Datto, Webroot, Marketopia, and more.
Jon Murchison, Blackpoint’s CEO and founder, and former US government cyber operations expert, explains the conference’s objective: “IT services and infrastructure have become mission critical for organizations to survive in this new economic landscape brought on by COVID-19. MSPs are the key to our success and, especially during these times, a collective national asset to their respective countries. That’s why we are bringing together experienced government and industry leaders to help MSPs navigate the current economic and security environments. We’re excited to provide one of the first online and socially-distanced conferences dedicated to MSPs and cyber security.”
Blackpoint has partnered with leading technology, service, and marketing firms for the conference, including:
Datto: leading global provider of cloud-based software and technology solutions purpose-built for MSPs
Webroot: Cybersecurity Solutions Purpose-Built for MSPs and SMBs
Convergint: Global, Service-based Systems Integrator
Marketopia: Lead Generation and Marketing for Technology Companies
ID Agent: Dark Web and Identity Theft Protection
TitanHQ: Email and DNS Security
Compliancy Group: HIPAA Compliance-as-a-Service
Atlantic Data Forensics: Premier Incident Response and Forensics
ProSource Technology Solutions: Leading Managed Service Provider
Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT): Premier Real Estate Investment Trust
Michael Morell, former Deputy Director and Acting Director CIA, will present the keynote session on national security implications of the Coronavirus outbreak. While at the CIA, Mr. Morell was President George W. Bush’s daily intelligence briefer during the 9/11 attacks and was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the CIA’s second highest honor.
Additional former US government cyber security and intelligence expert speakers include: Bill Priestap, former FBI Assistant Director of Counterintelligence, Chris Inglis, Former Deputy Director of NSA, Dave Sears, retired Commander and Navy SEAL, and Kevin Donegan, former United States Navy Vice Admiral and previous commander of the US Navy’s 5th fleet out of Bahrain. Security and MSP industry leaders will also present informational sessions, such as lead generation in a virtual world, security in the MSP space, cyber security for commercial real estate, the threat landscape of remote workers, and more.
Matt Solomon, VP of Business Development & IT at ID Agent, shares his sentiments on the conference: “ID Agent is very excited to participate in one of the first virtual MSP events since in-person events have been taken off the schedule. MSPs still need education during this period and we are honored to be part of such an esteemed group of vendors.”
In addition to learning how to stay secure and prosper, conference attendees will also be eligible for giveaways and prizes.
It has been well documented how much time businesses waste dealing with spam and there is no denying the threat that malicious spam emails (malspam) pose, but it is not just a problem for big business. Spam in academia is also a major problem.
A recent study published in the journal, Scientometrics, explores the cost of spam in academia. The study was primarily focused on spam emails sent by new, non-peer-reviewed journals that are attempting to gain a share of the market. These journals are adopting the same spam tactics often used by scammers to sell cheap watches and cut-price medications and for phishing and spreading malware.
Three researchers – Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, Aceil Al-Khatib, and Panagiotis Tsigaria – attempted to quantify the amount of time that is being wasted dealing with those messages and the losses that result.
To assess the extent of the problem, the researchers used figures from several studies on spamming to obtain an average number of targeted spam emails that academics receive each day. They opted for a conservative figure of 4-5 messages, per academic, per day. Most of those messages take just a few seconds to open and read but that time mounts up. They assumed an average time of 5 seconds per message – less than half a minute per day. That equates to $100 per researcher, per year at an average hourly rate of $50. Using the United Nations estimate of the number of researchers in academia globally, the total global cost of spam in academia was estimated to be $1.1 billion a year.
That figure is based on the lost time alone and does not factor in non-targeted spam emails – bulk unsolicited emails not specifically targeting researchers. Add in the time dealing with those messages and the global cost reaches $2.6 billion a year. To put the cost into perspective, $2.6 million is much more than the time researchers devote to peer review, which has been estimated at a cost of $1.9 billion a year. The figures do not include the considerable losses due to phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks. Factor in those costs and the losses would be several orders of magnitude higher.
Co-author of the study, Panagiotis Tsigaris, a professor of economics at Thompson Rivers University in Canada, explained that there is no silver bullet when it comes to dealing with spam and suggested several ways that the cost of spam in academia could be reduced.
Tsigaris suggests that penalties should be increased for publishing in predatory journals, and that academics should be educated about spam email and that improvements should be made to email filtering technology.
Here at TitanHQ, we are well aware of the problem of spam, both in terms of the productivity losses that spam causes, and harm caused by malicious spam emails.
To help prevent losses and downtime due to spam and email-based threats, TitanHQ has developed a powerful, easy-to-use, and cost-effective cloud-based spam filtering solution called SpamTitan. SpamTitan has been independently tested and shown to block in excess of 99.9% of spam email, 100% of known malware and ransomware threats, and thanks to a host of detection measures and sandboxing, SpamTitan is also effective at blocking zero-day (new) malware and ransomware threats.
To find out more about SpamTitan and how you can block more spam and ensure malicious emails do not reach your researchers’ inboxes, give the TitanHQ team a call today.
TitanHQ has announced a new partnership with Pax8. The partnership means Pax8 partners now have access to TitanHQ’s cloud-based email security solution – SpamTitan – and its DNS filtering solution, WebTitan.
Pax8 is the leader in cloud distribution. The company simplifies the cloud buying process and empowers businesses to achieve more with the cloud. The company has been named Best in Show for two consecutive years at the Next Gen and XChange conferences and is positioned at number 60 in the 2019 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing companies.
Pax8 carefully selects the vendors it works with and only offers market-leading channel friendly solutions to its partners. When searching for further cybersecurity solutions for its partners, TitanHQ was determined to be the perfect fit. TitanHQ is the leading provider of cloud-based email and web security solutions for managed service providers (MSPs) serving the SMB marketplace and its cybersecurity solutions are much loved by users. This was clearly shown in the 2019 G2 Crowd Report on Email Security Gateways where SpamTitan was named leader, having achieved 4- or 5-star ratings by 97% of its users, with 92% saying they would recommend the solution to other businesses.
Phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks have all increased in the past year and the cost of mitigating those attacks continues to rise. By implementing SpamTitan and WebTitan, SMBs and MSPs can secure their email environments and block web-based threats and keep their networks secure.
SpamTitan provides excellent protection for Office 365 environments. The solution detects and blocks phishing and email impersonation attacks and prevents known and zero-day malware and ransomware threats from reaching inboxes. The WebTitan Cloud DNS filtering solution blocks the web-based component of cyberattacks by preventing end users from visiting malicious websites, such as those harboring malware and phishing kits.
Both solutions are quick and easy to implement, can be seamlessly integrated into MSPs service stacks and cloud-management platforms, and Pax8 partners benefit from highly competitive and transparent pricing, centralized billing, and leading customer support.
“I am delighted to partner with the Pax8 team,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, TitanHQ. “Their focus and dedication to the MSP community are completely aligned with ours at TitanHQ, and we look forward to delivering our integrated solutions to their partners and customers.”
Over the past 2 decades TitanHQ has been developing powerful cybersecurity solutions for SMBs and managed service providers (MSPs) that serve the SMB market. Naturally at TitanHQ we have great belief in our email security solution, SpamTitan. We believe it is the ideal spam filtering solution for SMBs and MSPs for preventing a myriad of email threats from reaching inboxes.
TitanHQ is the leading provider of cloud-based email security to MSPs serving the SMB market. We regularly receive positive feedback from MSPs and SMBs about how the solution has saved them hours of work compared to other email security solutions and has helped them improve email security and block more spam and stop malware and ransomware from reaching inboxes.
Positive feedback from end users proves we are getting it right and it inspires us to continue improving the solution to ensure it will keep on protecting our customers from malware, ransomware, viruses, botnets, and social engineering and phishing attacks for many years to come.
The positive feedback is not only provided to our engineers and customer service and sales teams. IT decision makers have posted highly positive reviews on the top business software review platforms and are letting other IT professionals know about their experiences implementing the solution, integrating it with their other cybersecurity solutions and management platforms, and what it is like to use SpamTitan on a daily basis.
In fact, across the different business review sites, SpamTitan has consistently received high scores. There is no other email security product on the market that has achieved such a wealth of positive reviews and feedback from end users.
Some of the positive reviews across the leading business software review sites are detailed below:
Gartner Peer Insights
Gartner Peer insights is one of the most highly respected review platforms from the world’s leading business advisory and research company. While Gartner strictly polices the review site, Gartner is unbiassed and has no hidden agenda. The review platform gives IT professionals the opportunity to give their honest feedback on software solutions that they have implemented to help other IT professionals save time and money in their search.
36 qualified users of SpamTitan have left reviews on the site and the solution has achieved highly positive feedback with an average user score of 4.7 out of 5.
“SpamTitan has been a very responsive vendor to work with, both during the sales process and with post-sales support. Tickets are responded to within several hours and often resolved within a day. The product itself is very MSP-friendly supporting delegation to client admins, multiple delivery pools, and attractive pricing. The catch rate is better than Exchange Online.” Microsoft Team Lead in the Services Industry
“SpamTitan takes a little technical knowhow, but it’s powerful, flexible and affordable.” Director of IT and Telecom in the Healthcare Industry.
“SpamTitan is superb giving control back to the user and giving time back to IT staff. The product is amazing, it stopped 99% of spam and gives total control back to the user, it is web based and was easy to migrate to. The support and migration management from TitanHQ was brilliant.” IT Security Manager in the Manufacturing Industry.
G2 Crowd
G2 Crowd is one of the leading business software review sites. 139 verified users of SpamTitan have left reviews on the site and the solution has achieved an overall score of 4.6 out of 5. SpamTitan has been rated consistently highly in all rating categories, achieving 9.3 out of 10 for meets requirements and ease of doing business with, 9.2 for ease of setup and quality of support, 9.1 for ease of use, and 9.0 for ease of admin.
Additionally, each quarter, G2 Crowd compiles its Email Security Grid and rates solutions based on customer feedback and market presence. For four consecutive quarters, SpamTitan has been the Top Email Security Solution.
“I really like the customization that is available for this product. We have total control over the spam filter environment for all our customers. The environment is stable which is very important to us and our customers. The support staff was great when we were getting our environment configured. They were quick to reply to emails and reach out to assist us as needed. The spam filtering is top-notch and much better than other products we have used.” Jeff Banks, Director Of Technology.
Antispam that is affordable, flexible and powerful.” Mike S, Director of IT and Telecommunications.
“Cloud Version is Great for Managed Service Providers.” Andrew B, Vice President.
“Minimizes our exposure to harmful malware and junk emails.” David C, Outreach Specialist.
Google Reviews
112 users of SpamTitan have taken the time to submit their feedback to Google Reviews. The solution is consistently given top marks by users and has achieved an overall review score of 4.9 out of 5.
Some of the positive feedback from users includes:
“TitanHQ is an excellent solution which ticks many boxes. It’s simple to setup, and gives a huge range of functionality all from within one place. My experience of the Support help desk has been great with a team that really do know their product. I highly recommend TitanHQ.” Chris Bell.
“The Titan Span filter is by far one of the best email filters I have ever used. It was simple to setup, it allows users to release their own emails from quarantine quick and easy.” Joseph Walsh.
“Great product. Spam reduced to almost zero and no user complaints. Configuration is simple and support is awesome. Love it!” George Homme.
Capterra
Capterra is a leading software review site that has been active for 20 years. The site has now been purchased by Gartner which moderates reviews on the site. Capterra includes more than 700 categories of software products and is one of the most highly respected business software review sites. It is relied upon by IT decision makers the world over.
SpamTitan has been reviewed by 379 users and has achieved an overall review score of 4.6 out of 5.
“It’s as close to “set it and forget it” as you can come in the IT field. Right out of the box support helped me set everything up in less than 20 minutes, no hardware to worry about, nothing like that. Literally all I have to do is check to see if something was blocked incorrectly once in a while, white list it, and done. I’ve been using spam titan for almost a year and in that time we have blocked over 200k spam/malicious emails for a 30 person company before they even hit employee mailboxes. I shut off the service for 48 hours just to make sure it easy legit, it was, and I haven’t shut it off again since. Whitelisting and blacklisting domains and specific emails are super easy. Support Staff are awesome and go into detail when resolving problems if they were to arise or even if you just have a question. They have always been friendly and courteous and super personable and have been some of the best people to work with in all my years doing IT.” Benjamin Jones, Director Of Information Technology.
“SpamTitan has saved me, saved my company time, and has some of the best support people around. It’s as close to “set it and forget it” as you can come in the IT field. Right out of the box support helped me set everything up in less than 20 minutes, no hardware to worry about, nothing like that. Literally all I have to do is check to see if something was blocked incorrectly once in a while, white list it, and done. I’ve been using spam titan for almost a year and in that time we have blocked over 200k spam/malicious emails for a 30 person company before they even hit employee mailboxes.” Benjamin J, Director of Information Technology.
Spiceworks
Members of the Spiceworks community have also rated SpamTitan highly. The solution has been reviewed by 56 users and has an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5.
Software Advice
The software review site Software Advice includes 350 reviews of SpamTitan from business users and has achieved an average score of 5.58 out of 5.
SpamFilterReviews
According to SpamFilterReviews, SpamTitan is the top-rated spam filtering solution on the site with a score of 4.9 out of 5.
Cyberattacks on managed service providers have been increasing over the past few months and they are now a key target for hackers. If a hacker can gain access to the systems of a managed service provider, their remote administration tools can be used to launch attacks on their clients.
There have been several major cyberattacks on managed services providers in the past few weeks, with nation-state-backed hacking groups targeting MSPs serving enterprises and ransomware gangs are conducting attacks on MSPs serving small and medium-sized businesses.
Three major cyberattacks on managed service providers serving healthcare organizations in the United States have been reported in the past two months. All three have affected more than 100 healthcare clients and one impacted 400.
In late November, the Milwaukee-based managed IT service provider, Virtual Care Provider Inc., was attacked with Ryuk ransomware. The attack started on November 17, 2019, and affected all of its clients’ data. Around 110 nursing homes and acute care facilities were prevented from accessing their patients’ medical records. The consequences for its clients were dire. Assisted living facilities and nursing homes were prevented from billing for Medicaid, which meant essential funding was not provided and nursing homes were prevented from ordering essential drugs for patients. Virtual Care Provider was issued with a $14 million ransom demand, which the company could not afford to pay. The managed service provider had around 20% of its services affected and had to rebuild around 100 servers.
The ransomware was deployed as a secondary payload by the TrickBot Trojan. TrickBot had been installed on its network 14 months previously via a malicious email attachment.
A few weeks later, a Colorado-based managed service provider serving dental practices was attacked with ransomware. Complete Technology Solutions was infected with a ransomware variant called Sodinokibi. First, the MSP was attacked, and then its remote administration tools were used to deploy ransomware on the networks of more than 100 dental practices. A ransom demand of $700,000 was issued, which the MSP refused to pay. Its clients are now having to pay the attackers for the keys to decrypt their files. Only a few that had backups stored off the network were able to recover without paying the ransom.
This is the second such attack to affect a company serving the dental industry. The dental record backup service provider, PerCSoft, was also attacked with Sodinokibi ransomware. That attack affected approximately 400 dental practices. CyrusOne was also attacked with Sodinokibi ransomware and its managed services division and six of its clients were affected.
It is not only ransomware that is being used in the attacks. Nation-state threat groups such as APT10 are also targeting MSPs. Their aims are different. The attacks are being conducted to gain access to the intellectual property of their enterprise customers.
As cyberattacks on managed service providers increase, MSPs must ensure that they have adequate defenses in place to keep the hackers at bay. This is an area where TitanHQ can help. TitanHQ is the leading provider of cloud-based email and web security solutions for managed service providers that serve the SMB market.
TitanHQ offers a trio of solutions for MSPs under the TitanShield program. SpamTitan email security is a powerful cloud-based solution that keeps inboxes free of spam, phishing emails, and malware. SpamTitan incorporates SPF and DMARC to block email impersonation attacks, dual antivirus engines to detect known malware threats, and heuristics and sandboxing to identify and block zero-day threats.
WebTitan Cloud is a 100% cloud-based DNS filtering solution that works seamlessly with SpamTitan to block web-based phishing attacks and malware downloads. The solution allows you to monitor and identify malicious threats in real-time and includes AI-driven protection against active and emerging phishing URLs, including zero-minute threats.
The third solution is ArcTitan, a cloud-based email archiving solution that provides protection against data loss and helps MSPs and their clients meet their compliance obligations. ArcTitan serves as a black box flight recorder for email and stores email data securely in the cloud on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3. When emails need to be searched and recovered, the searches are lightning-fast. ArcTitan can search up to 30 million emails a second.
ArcTitan has recently been moved to a brand new system, with the service delivered as a highly available, self-healing horizontally scaled Kubernetes cluster. Within that cluster are many different components working in harmony together, but independently. Should any component go down, that component can be taken offline and repaired with no impact on the others, ensuring a much more reliable service with minimal or no disruption during an outage. With ArcTitan, email is protected from cyberattacks.
These solutions are not only an ideal for improving the security posture of MSP clients, they can help to ensure that MSP systems are protected from attack. All TitanHQ solutions are quick and easy to implement, have a low management overhead, and are API-driven so they can easily be incorporated into MSP’s remote management and monitoring systems.
To find out more about the TitanShield program for managed service providers and to discover how TitanHQ’s cybersecurity solutions can improve yours and your clients’ security posture, give the TitanHQ channel team a call today.
SMBs and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that serve the SMB market have many spam filtering services to choose from. In this post perform a VadeSecure vs SpamTitan Email Security comparison to help you decide on the best solution to meet the needs of your business.
Who are VadeSecure?
VadeSecure is a French company that was founded in 2009. The company has developed a predictive email defense solution to protect businesses from email-based threats and spam email, and also consumers through their ISPs. The company has yet to make great inroads in the MSP market, although that is part of the company’s plan, having recently raised $79 million in venture capital to help them achieve this aim.
SpamTitan Email Security from TitanHQ
TitanHQ is the leading provider of cloud-based email and web security solutions for MSPs that serve the SMB market. TitanHQ has more than 2 decades of experience in email and web security and has developed two award winning solutions for MSPs – WebTitan (Web Security) and SpamTitan Email Security. Here we will focus on SpamTitan Email Security.
VadeSecure vs SpamTitan Email Security
Take a quick look at VadeSecure and SpamTitan Email Security and you may think that both solutions are very similar, and in some respects they are. Both are cloud-based email security solutions that have been designed to block email threats and keep inboxes free from spam and malicious messages and attachments. Both solutions have been developed to provide an additional security layer for Office365 to block the many spam and malicious messages that bypass O365 security controls.
However, there are some very important differences between the solutions as far as MSPs are concerned. VadeSecure has been developed solely for the Telco market, but MSPs have unique requirements that are not well catered to. A deeper dive into the products and a more thorough comparison of VadeSecure vs SpamTitan Email Security from an MSP perspective reveals the two solutions are very different products.
SpamTitan is very much MSP focused. Over time, with the increased investment, VadeSecure may become a more MSP friendly solution, but as it stands VadeSecure and SpamTitan Email Security are not equivalent solutions.
Comparison of VadeSecure and SpamTitan Email Security for MSPs
SpamTitan Email Security has been developed by MSPs for MSPs. SpamTitan Email Security is therefore a very MSP-focused product, which incorporates many MSP-friendly features. SpamTitan is a true multi-tenant solution. With SpamTitan Email Security, MSPs are given a multi-tenancy view of all customers with multiple management roles. This allows MSPs to easily monitor all customer deployments and the trial-base, assess the health of those deployments, view activity volumes across your entire customer base, and quickly identify any issues that need to be addressed. VadeSecure lacks this customer-wide view of the system and does not integrate with RMMs or PSAs.
Configurability and Customization Potential
Configurability is also a key consideration. VadeSecure is not easily configurable to meet your needs. For instance, it does not support custom rules, so you have to use Office 365 Exchange admin functionality for configuration. In a similar vein, the potential for customization is limited with VadeSecure. With SpamTitan Email Security, there is plenty of scope for customization. You can create custom rules to meet the needs of your customer base thanks to highly granular controls that can be applied to domains, groups, or individual users. This level of granularity is important, as it allows you to carefully configure the solution to meet the needs of each client. You can tailor the solution to suit the risk tolerance of each individual client and adopt a more aggressive or more permissive approach on a per client basis and minimize false positives and false negatives. VadeSecure lacks the granularity to allow this for each customer.
Management and Reporting
You are implementing email security to provide your customers with greater security, but you need to make sure the solution remains effective over time. You will therefore need to identify issues as they arise and perform tweaks to continue to protect your clients to the highest degree. To achieve this, you need highly granular reports. Without them you will not have the visibility you need. SpamTitan’s suite of pre-configured and customizable reports give you full visibility into your deployments to allow you to quickly identify and correct any issues.
You can also generate reports (manually or automatically) that you can send to your clients to show them how effective the solution is, the threats that are being blocked, and why continued protection is essential. With VadeSecure you lack this visibility and cannot find out what has been blocked for end users or obtain detailed information on spam emails and threats. Client management is also more difficult with VadeSecure. MSPs need to login to each client’s Office 365 environment for management, which makes reporting much more time consuming.
Revenue Potential and Margins
Because SpamTitan allows MSPs to customize their deployments, MSPs have superior management capabilities and can offer clients greater value, which means greater margin potential for MSPs. It also makes it harder for clients to switch providers as their MSP is more of a strategic partner rather than just an IT service provider.
With TitanHQ there is also greater potential to make more margin by cross selling other services. MSPs that sign up with TitanHQ and join the TitanShield program have access to two other revenue generating solutions: WebTitan DNS filtering and ArcTitan Email Archiving. These allow you to maximize monthly recurring revenue with each client. Additional revenue-generating solutions are not available with VadeSecure.
VadeSecure Vs SpamTitan Email Security Pricing
Currently, pricing with VadeSecure is complex and the solution is expensive for MSPs. VadeSecure is charged on a per module basis, which means you need to factor in a lot of additional costs, such as anti-virus protection and GreyMail which are not included as standard. With SpamTitan there is one flat fee that includes all features of the solution. TitanHQ pricing is totally transparent and there are no hidden extras.
After speaking with customers that have tried VadeSecure, we have learned that the total number of users are not aggregated into the MSP discount with VadeSecure. You could have 100 x 10-seat licenses (1,000 users), but VadeSecure pays at 10 seats each and not the 1,000 seats overall. In contrast, TitanHQ’s appreciates how MSPs work and has developed a flexible pricing policy accordingly.
Quick Comparison of Features
In the image below we have compared the basic features of both SpamTitan and VadeSecure as a quick reference to show you some of the key differences between VadeSecure and SpamTitan Email Security.
MSPs that serve customers with Office 365 environments should adopt a layered approach to security and should not rely on the anti-spam and anti-phishing defenses incorporated into Office 365. Additional layers are required to better protect clients, which will mean you spend less time on support and remediating phishing attacks.
TitanHQ can provide two additional layers to your security stack: SpamTitan and WebTitan, both of which work seamlessly together to protect against all email and web-based threats.
To find out more about these solutions, how you can reduce the cost of email security and web security for your customers while earning a profitable margin, contact the TitanHQ team today and ask to speak to the channel team.
TitanHQ has announced that a new version of its award-winning cloud-based anti-spam service and anti-spam software has been released. SpamTitan v7.06 incorporates a new RESTapi to allow clients and partners to seamlessly integrate SpamTitan into their own systems.
The new version was released on November 12, 2019 and has automatically been applied to the cloud-based offering. Users of SpamTitan software will have had the latest version downloaded, although they will need to login to their UI to apply the update.
As part of the regular patching cycle, SpamTitan patches have been released to address reporting engine issues and patches and ISO/OVA images are now available. These have been released for several packages including OpenSSL, OpenSSH, PHP, ClamAV and sudo. The patches must also be applied manually by administrators on their appliance(s).
TitanHQ has had a busy 2019. The company has experienced 30% growth in 2019 and has just had its busiest ever quarter for MSP growth. The growth has been driven by demand from MSPs for easy to use email security and web security solutions to protect their SMB clients from the growing number of cybersecurity threats.
TitanHQ now has more than 2,200 MSP partners using its platform and the strong Q3 growth has continued in Q4 helped by the new “Margin Maker for MSPs” Q4 initiative.
“Implementing the RESTapi and encouraging API adoption are vital steps in our partnership expansion plans,” explained TitanHQ CEO, Ronan Kavanagh. “We have enjoyed a record-breaking growth and the latest enhancements and new features that have been added to SpamTitan will help to ensure growth in 2020 will continue at record levels.”
Q3, 2019 has seen TitanHQ register record-breaking growth in the MSP market with its busiest ever quarter for MSP sales. TitanHQ now has more than 2,200 MSP partners and its cloud-based email security, web security, and email archiving platforms are now used by more than 8,200 businesses around the world.
Many great success stories start from humble beginnings, and TitanHQ is no exception. The company started life as Copperfasten Technologies in 1999 and sold anti-spam appliances to local businesses from its Galway, Ireland base. The company then developed its own cybersecurity solutions, starting with the anti-spam and anti-phishing solution, SpamTitan.
The product portfolio grew to include WebTitan web filtering, a powerful DNS-based web security solution to protect businesses from the full range of internet threats. That was followed by the launch of ArcTitan, a cloud-based email archiving solution for businesses that eases their email storage and compliance burden.
That trio of core TitanHQ products has proven to be a massive hit with managed service providers, although not by accident. Many companies have developed innovative solutions for SMBs but have only realized the importance of the MSP market later on. Additional features are then added to appeal to MSPs. TitanHQ took a different approach. Its solutions were developed by MSPs for MSPs and MSPs were considered at every stage of product development. The result is a suite of security solutions tailor-made for MSPs.
This approach, along with cutting-edge technology and industry-leading customer support, has seen the company go from strength to strength and become the gold standard in email and web security and the leading global provider of cloud-based security solutions for MSPs servicing the SMB market.
Phishing attacks on businesses are soaring, new malware variants are being released at record levels, and the current ransomware epidemic is threatening to derail businesses. Many SMBs lack the internal resources to block these threats and turn to MSPs to provide the security they need.
To cope with the increased demand, MSPs need solutions with 100% cloud-based architecture that seamlessly integrate into their existing centralized management systems and are easy to implement, use, and maintain. Ideally, those solutions need to be flexible, have a range of hosting options, be available in white-label form to take MSP branding, and also include generous margins. That is a big ask, and many solutions only tick a few of those boxes. However, TitanHQ’s suite of solutions include all those features and more.
TitanHQ also offers extensive sales enablement and marketing support, world-class customer service, and each MSP has a dedicated account manager, engineers, and a support team to help them maximize their sales opportunities and really grow their businesses.
As part of the celebration of the Q3, 2019 MSP growth, TitanHQ has launched a new initiative to ensure Q4 will be an even bigger success.
On October 22, TitanHQ announced a new disruptive price package for a SpamTitan Email Security and WebTitan DNS filtering bundle at an exclusive once-in-a-lifetime price. The initiative has been called Margin Maker for MSPs and is intended to ensure MSPs build profitability instantly in Q4, 2019.
The two solutions are provided in two private clouds, customized to meet MSPs email and web security needs, and secure the most common attack vectors – email and the web. The package includes advanced protection for email, including Office 365 environments, complimented by WebTitan DNS filtering to block web-based threats and implement content control for on-premises and remote workers. These solutions are naturally provided with extensive sales enablement and marketing support.
The aim is to make TitanHQ’s email and web security platforms even more appealing to MSPs and to encourage MSPs to offer both SpamTitan email security and WebTitan web filtering to their clients and maximize revenues.
One MSP that is already boosting its profits and achieving increased, reliable recurring monthly revenues is UK-based OpalIT. The MSP has bases in Newcastle and Edinburgh and a 6,000+ customer base. Prior to joining the TitanShield program, OpalIT was offering its clients firewall filtering and email filtering with Barracuda and Vade. The company has now switched to TitanHQ’s cybersecurity bundle and is pushing SpamTitan Email Security, WebTitan DNS filtering, and ArcTitan email archiving to its clients and is reaping the rewards.
“Opal IT moved to TitanHQ because of our MSP focused solutions, ease of deployments, extensive APIs functionality and the increased margin they’re now making. Our cybersecurity bundle solutions allow MSPs to provide their downstream customers with a layered defense approach” said Rocco Donnino, EVP Strategic Alliances, TitanHQ.
If you are a managed service provider, now is the perfect time to sign up with TitanHQ. Come and meet the TitanHQ channel team at the following MSP events to find out more about the TitanShield program for MSPs, OEMs, and service providers, and take advantage of the amazing new MSP package.
If you are unable to attend any of these events, be sure to give the TitanHQ team a call to find out more and take advantage of this exciting new and exclusive offer.
IT Nation Connect 2019, the ConnectWise conference for the IT professional community, will be taking place on October 30, 31, and November 1 at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Florida.
The event is the leading conference for companies that sell, support, and service technology and is focused on helping attendees build a strong business and achieve long-term success. Attendees will gain practical advice from experts in the IT Nation community and will have the opportunity to build meaningful business connections and learn how to work on their businesses.
This year’s topics for the session tracks are mergers & acquisitions, growth & scalability, talent development & leadership, service delivery & customer success, sales & marketing, and security.
Security is a key focus of IT Nation Connect 2019. The event will provide opportunities to discover how security frameworks and IT solutions can help you bulletproof your business and protect your clients’ networks from cyberattacks. Attendees will also gain deep insights into the current state of security in the MSP space.
Leading security experts will be discussing the steps that the government is taking to combat cyber threats, the lessons the government and private firms have learned, and how security experts see the threat landscape evolving over the coming year.
Founders and CEOs of the most successful MSPs and IT firms will explain what it is like to be a trailblazer, how they achieved their successes, the mistakes they made on the way, and what the future holds for the IT Nation community.
More than 80 thought leaders, ConnectWise partners, and ConnectWise colleagues will taking over 130 educational, networking and panel sessions and will be sharing success stories, best practices, and the lessons they have learned to help attendees succeed and grow their businesses.
The conference offers an exceptional opportunity for learning, networking, and discovering technology solutions that can save you time, money, and boost the profitability of your business. Such an important event for the IT community is not to be missed.
TitanHQ will be attending the event to explain why TitanHQ is the global leader in cloud-based email and web security solutions for MSPs servicing the SMB market, the advantages of doing business with TitanHQ, and how TitanHQ solutions can help you better protect your environment and those of your clients from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
TitanHQ Marketing Director Dryden Geary, Sales Director Conor Madden, and Inside Sales Executive Peter Cooke will explain the benefits of the TitanShield program for MSPs, OEMs, technology partners, and Wi-Fi providers and show you just how easy it is to incorporate SpamTitan email security, WebTitan DNS filtering, and ArcTitan email archiving into your security stacks.
If you are attending the event, be sure to make time to meet with TitanHQ and feel free to reach out in advance of the event if you have any questions.
The 2019 Canalys Cybersecurity Forum will be taking place in Barcelona on October 16-17, 2019. The event is the only independent conference dedicated to the cybersecurity channel and is one of the most important events of the year for managed service providers (MSPs).
The event provides an incredible opportunity for MSPs looking to enhance their security stacks, provide greater value, and better protect their clients from increasingly sophisticated security threats. Attendees will have the opportunity to have 1:1 meetings with more than 700 established and new partners and discover best practices to adopt to get the most out of their cybersecurity solutions.
The event is also a must for MSPs who have yet to start offering managed security services as it will allow them to form new partnerships with Europe’s best cybersecurity solution partners who will help them grow their businesses significantly over the coming year.
Leading cybersecurity vendors will be taking thought-crunching sessions and sharing their knowledge to help partners succeed. Attendees will be able to engage in intense debates and interact with some of the brightest minds in the field of cybersecurity. Questions can be posed in multi-vendor theatre panels to get the answers from the leading cybersecurity solution providers in the EMEA region.
Highlights of this year’s event include panels, theatre and keynotes exploring the re-imaging of the idea of solutions, generalist vs. specialist in the cybersecurity channel, the next catalyst that will drive security sales, and how the role of the CSO is evolving in the hybrid IT world.
Canalys analysts will also be providing keynote speeches and sharing their insights into the current threat landscape and some of the burning issues of the moment. The event will also see Canalys name the new Threat Fighter and MSSP winners in the Canalys Channel Partner Awards.
TitanHQ Sales Director, Conor Madden
The event provides an amazing opportunity for networking with more than 200 channel partner delegates in attendance. New alliances can be formed and along with the knowledge gained, attendees will be able to make important decisions that will have a major positive impact on growth for the coming year.
TitanHQ is a proud sponsor of the 2019 Canalys Cybersecurity Forum and the team will be on hand to answer questions and explain why TitanHQ is the global leader in cloud-based email and web security solutions for the MSP that services the SMB market.
TitanHQ Strategic Alliance Manager, Marc Ludden
At the event you will be able to discover the considerable benefits of using SpamTItan email security, WebTitan DNS filtering, and ArcTitan email archiving to solve your clients security issues, better protect them from cybersecurity threats, and help them achieve their compliance objectives… and how easy TitanHQ makes this for MSPs.
TitanHQ Sales Director Conor Madden will be a panelist at the event and will be answering questions from attendees on email security, web security, email archiving and how to get the most out of TitanHQ’s cybersecurity solutions for MSPS and SMBs.
Marc Ludden, TitanHQ’s Strategic Alliance Manager, will also be attending and meeting with enterprise-level clients and major MSPs and ISPs to help them push TitanHQ products downstream to their customers, grow their businesses, and improve their bottom lines.
You can find out more about this one in a year opportunity here – Canalys Cybersecurity Forum 2019 – and feel free to reach out to TitanHQ in advance of the event.
If you are unable to attend this year’s Canalys event, TitanHQ will be on the road throughout October and November. Be sure to connect at one of the other fall 2019 events below:
The collapse of the package holiday operator Thomas Cook left thousands of holidaymakers stranded, hundreds of thousands of holiday bookings have been cancelled, and more than 9,000 staff have lost their jobs. The company and other UK firms in its group have been forced into compulsory liquidation and cybercriminals have been quick to take advantage. Dozens of Thomas Cook-related domains were registered following the collapse of the firm and several Thomas Cook phishing scams have been detected.
Customer that have incurred out-of-pocket expenses as a result of the collapse of the company and anyone who has paid for a package holiday that has been cancelled may be entitled to a refund or compensation. That has given scammers the perfect opportunity to launch phishing attacks seeking bank account an credit card information.
Customers who have booked Thomas Cook holidays are protected under the ATOL scheme and refunds are being processed by the Civil Aviation Authority, which has set up a subdomain on its website – thomascook.caa.co.uk – where customers can submit claims for refunds. More than 360,000 holidays have been booked for more than 800,000 holidaymakers, who are entitled to refunds. More than 60,000 customers submitted refund forms on the first day that the website was set up and claims for out-of-pocket expenses are being processed by travel insurance firms. The CAA has stated that it will take 60 days for the refunds to be issued.
Anyone who has yet to submit their claim should exercise caution as there are multiple phishing scams being conducted offering money back on canceled holidays, reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses, compensation, and fake updates on the status of refund claims. Any email received in relation to Thomas Cook should be treated as a potential scam.
Scams may be conducted with the aim of spreading malware or ransomware. Malicious code is contained in file attachments that trigger a malware download when the attachment is opened. However, far more common in situations when people are demanding refunds is to send phishing emails containing hyperlinks to malicious websites. Those websites require sensitive information such as credit card information and bank account details to be entered. Scammers are well aware that in order for refunds to be processed, bank account information would be required and phishing forms have been set up on fake Thomas Cook domains to do just that.
While there may be some giveaways that emails are not genuine – spelling mistakes and grammatical errors – some Thomas Cook phishing scams are virtually impossible to distinguish from genuine communications. Banks have also been notifying customers by email, which has presented scammers with even more opportunities to hoodwink Thomas Cook customers. There have also been reports of former employees being targeted by scammers offering compensation.
The golden rule to avoid becoming a victim of Thomas Cook phishing scams is never to respond to a request in an unsolicited email. Attachments should not be opened, hyperlinks in emails should not be followed, and contact information included in the message body should not be used. Only use official channels such as the CAA website, and contact banks and travel insurance firms directly using verified contact information.
The cost of a ransomware attack can be considerable. Several attacks in the United States have seen payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars made for the keys to unlock the encryption. While those payments are certainly high, they are a fraction of the total cost of a ransomware attack which are usually several times the cost of any ransom payment.
Recovery without paying a ransom can be considerably more. The ransomware attack on the city of Baltimore saw a ransom demand of around $76,000 issued. Baltimore refused to pay. The attack is estimated to have cost the city at least $18.2 million.
The cost of that ransomware attack is high, but nowhere the cost of a suspected September 2019 ransomware attack on the Danish hearing aid manufacturer Demant. The firm experienced the attack on or around September 3, 2019. One month on and the firm still hasn’t recovered. In a recent message to its investors, the firm said the cyberattack would cost an estimated $80 million to $95 million, even though the company held a cyber insurance policy. Without that policy the bill would have been $14.6 million higher.
According to a notice on the firm’s website, it experienced “a critical incident” when its “IT infrastructure was hit by cyber-crime.” Ransomware was not mentioned by the firm although it has been reported as a ransomware attack by the Danish media.
The attack impacted its Polish production and distribution facilities, French cochlear implants production sites, Mexican production and service sites, its amplifier production site in Denmark, its entire Asia-Pacific network, and its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
The firm is recovering its IT infrastructure and believes it will take a further two weeks for systems to be restored and business operations to approach normality. However, the effects of the attack are expected to be long-lasting.
The inability to access its systems across all these areas has caused major disruption to the company. The firm has been unable to supply its products, receive and process orders, and clinics in its network have had difficulty servicing end users.
Due to the limited information released it is unclear whether the company refused to pay a ransom, if the attackers could not supply valid keys to unlock the encryption, of if this was a sabotage attack akin to the NotPetya wiper malware attacks of 2017.
If this was a ransomware attack, the losses far exceed those of the Norwegian aluminum and energy company Norsk Hydro, whose ransomware attack cost the firm around $70 million, although it is a fraction of the cost of the NotPetya attacks on the shipping firm Maersk and FedEx, both of which caused losses of around $300 million.
These incidents all demonstrate just how damaging cyberattacks can be and the massive costs of recovery. As is typical, the cost of recovering its IT systems accounted for a small proportion of the total cost – around $7.3 million. The bulk of the losses were due to lost sales and the inability to process orders, which the company says make up around half of the estimated losses.
In a press release, the firm said in addition to the lost sales, “the incident has prevented us from executing our ambitious growth activities in some of the most important months of the year – particularly in the US, which is our biggest market.”
Malware, ransomware and wiper malware are most commonly delivered via a small number of attack vectors. All too often they start with a phishing email, exploitation of RDP, drive-by malware download, or the exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities. The cost of preventative measures to block these attack vectors is pocket change by comparison to the cost of recovery from an attack.
TitanHQ cannot help businesses with securing RDP and patching promptly, but we can help businesses secure the email system and protect against drive-by malware downloads and other web-based attacks.
To find out more about how you can improve security against email- and web-based attacks, from a cost of as little as 90 cents per user per month, give our sales team a call.
The sales team will be happy to explain the ins and outs of our web and email security solutions, schedule product demonstrations, and help set you up for a free trial of our SpamTitan email security and WebTitan web security solutions and greatly improve your defenses against phishing, ransomware, malware, and wiper attacks.
The dangers of ransomware attacks have been made abundantly clear to more than 5,000 patients in California whose medical records have been permanently lost as a result of a ransomware attack on their healthcare provider.
Simi Valley, CA-based Wood Ranch Medical experienced the attack on August 10, 2019 which saw ransomware deployed and executed on its servers which contained the medical records of 5,835 patients. The attack caused permanent damage to computer systems, and since backup copies of patient records were also encrypted, those records have been permanently lost. It is unclear how much the attackers demanded as payment for the keys and whether those keys would have worked had the ransom been paid.
Without patient records and faced with the prospect of having to totally rebuild the medical practice from scratch, the decision was taken to permanently close the business. Patients have been forced to find alternative healthcare providers and no longer have access to their medical records.
This is the second healthcare provider in the United States that has been forced out of business due to a ransomware attack. Brookside ENT and Hearing Center in Battle Creek, Michigan also closed its practice this year as a result of a ransomware attack. In that case, the practice owners refused to pay the ransom demand and patient records were permanently encrypted. The practice owners decided it was not possible to rebuild the practice from scratch and announced their early retirement.
It is unclear exactly how the ransomware was installed in each of these incidents, so it is not possible to determine what defenses could have been improved to prevent the attacks. However, in both cases, recovery of files from backups was not possible.
The purpose of a backup is to ensure that in the event of disaster, data will be recoverable. File recovery may be time consuming and downtime due to the attack likely to be expensive, but data will not be permanently lost.
In order to ensure file recovery is possible, backups must be tested. Files may be corrupted during the backup process and data restoration may not be possible. If backups are not tested to make sure files can be recovered, it will not be possible to guarantee file recovery in the event of disaster.
These incidents also highlight another fundamental rule of backing up. NEVER store the only copy of a backup on a networked or internet-connected computer.
In the event of ransomware attack, it is highly likely that backup copies on networked devices will be encrypted along with shadow volume copies. Ransomware encrypts these files to make sure the only way of recovering data is paying the ransom.
Even paying a ransom comes with no guarantee that data will be recoverable. Files may be corrupted through the encryption/decryption process – some data loss is inevitable – and the attackers may not be able to supply valid keys to decrypt files.
A good backup approach to adopt to prevent disasters such as these is a 3-2-1 strategy. 3 backups should be created, which should be stored on 2 different media, with 1 copy stored securely off site on a device that is not networked or connected to the internet.
G2 Crowd, the independent peer-to-peer business software review site, has published its G2 Crowd Grid® Summer 2019 Report for Cloud Email Security. For the third consecutive quarter, SpamTitan has been named the leading cloud email security provider having been awarded the highest score for customer satisfaction.
G2 Crowd is the largest tech marketplace for businesses. The site attracts more than 3 million visitors and contains more than 843,500 reviews from verified software users. The reviews and Grid Reports are relied upon by countless businesses to help them make better software buying decisions.
Each quarter, G2 Crowd produces Grid reports that highlight the key players in different software categories. The G2 Crowd Grids are used to rank software solutions based on market presence and user satisfaction and categorize each as wither a niche player, contender, high performer, or leader. To be named a leader, a product must have a strong market presence and high user satisfaction level.
Market presence is determined by the size of the company, its social impact, and market share. The user satisfaction score is calculated from amalgamated reviews from verified users of the software.
User reviews are important when choosing a software solution. If the software is difficult to use, fails to live up to expectations, or does not provide the required functionality, staff will avoid using it as much as possible. For a security solution that is particularly bad news.
The Summer 2019 report includes 9 email security solutions. SpamTitan achieved the highest overall customer satisfaction score – 97% – of all nine solutions by some distance. The next highest customer satisfaction scores were for Proofpoint Email Security & Protection (75%), Area 1 Security (69%), and Barracuda Email Security Gateway (61%).
In addition to the Grid reports, amalgamated scores are included for six different customer satisfaction criteria: Ease of setup, ease of use, ease of admin, ease of doing business, quality of support, and meets requirements. Once again, SpamTitan topped the list with the highest score for ease of setup (92%) and ease of use (92%) and was one of only two solutions that achieved scores of over 90% in each of the six categories.
“The overwhelmingly positive feedback on G2 Crowd from users of SpamTitan is indicative of our commitment to ensuring the highest levels of customer success,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, TitanHQ. “That’s an incredible achievement for a product that is significantly more affordable than the market leaders.”
This fall, TitanHQ will be attending several Managed Service Provider (MSP) events and trade shows throughout Europe and the United States.
TitanHQ has been developing innovative cybersecurity solutions for MSPs for more than two decades and all solutions have been created with MSPs firmly in mind. By involving MSPs in the design process, TitanHQ has been able to ensure that its products incorporate features to make life easier for MSPs, such as easy integration into MSPs management systems through the use of APIs to features rarely found in cybersecurity products – such as full white label versions ready for MSP branding and the ability to host the solutions within MSPs own environments.
Trade shows give the TitanHQ team the opportunity to meet face to face with prospective clients to discuss their email and web security needs and get face to face feedback from current customers that have already integrated TitanHQ products into their technology stacks.
The TitanHQ team kicked off the fall schedule of trade shows on September 12 at the Taylor Business Group BIG 2019 Conference at the Westin Hotel in Chicago, where members got to meet the TitanHQ team to discuss the new TitanShield program and discover how TitanHQ products can improve security for their clients while saving MSPs time and money.
At the same time, TitanHQ was at the CloudSec Europe 2019 Conference in London demonstrating WebTitan Cloud, SpamTitan Cloud, and ArcTitan to MSPs and cloud service providers.
If you were unable to attend either of these two events or did not get the chance to meet with the team, all is not lost. The fall schedule has only just commenced and there are still plenty of opportunities to meet the team to discuss your requirements and find out how TitanHQ products can meet and exceed your expectations.
Trade Events Attended by TitanHQ – Autumn, 2019
Date
Event
Location
September 17, 2019
Datto Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
September 18, 2019
MSH Summit
London, UK
October 6-10, 2019
Gitex
Dubai, UAE
October 7-8, 2019
CompTIA EMEA Show
London, UK
October 16-17, 2019
Canalys Cybersecurity Forum
Barcelona, Spain
October 21-23, 2019
DattoCon Paris
Paris, France
October 30, 2019
MSH Summit North
Manchester, UK
October 30, 2019
IT Nation Evolve (HTG 4)
Florida, USA
October 30, 2019
IT Nation Connect
Florida, USA
November 5-7, 2019
Kaseya Connect
Amsterdam, Netherlands
If you plan on attending any of the above events this fall, be sure to come and visit the TitanHQ team and feel free to reach out ahead of the events for further information.
Rocco Donnino, Executive Vice President-Strategic Alliances, LinkedIn
Eddie Monaghan, MSP Alliance Manager, LinkedIn
Marc Ludden, MSP Alliance Manager, LinkedIn
Dryden Geary, Marketing Director
TitanHQ has announced it has entered not a new partnership with one of the United Kingdom’s leading Managed Service Providers (MSPs), OneStopIT.
For more than 16 years, OneStopIT has been helping small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) implement enterprise-class technology solutions. The Edinburgh-based MSP is focused on providing process-driven IT solutions to growing organizations at an affordable price.
Through the company’s dealing with UK businesses it has become clear that one of the biggest problem areas is phishing. Phishing attacks on UK businesses are now occurring at record pace and those attacks are costing businesses dearly.
UK businesses need advanced, enterprise-level cybersecurity solutions, but at an affordable SMB-friendly price. To improve protection against phishing and malware attacks, OneStopIT turned to TitanHQ.
TitanHQ has developed powerful cloud-based solutions for the SMB marketplace that incorporate enterprise-grade security features, but at a price that is affordable for even the smallest business. These solutions have been developed to be delivered by MSPs and can be easily incorporated into MSP auto-provisioning, billing, and management systems.
Under the new partnership, OneStopIT will be offering its customers SpamTItan-powered advanced email security and anti-phishing protection, WebTitan-powered DNS-based web filtering, and an ArcTitan-powered email archiving service.
All three solutions have been seamlessly integrated into OneStopIT’s security stack and are now being used to better protect its customers from today’s advanced and sophisticated cyber threats.
“ The proliferation of phishing threats across Office 365 is a real problem for SME’s in the UK and we’re partnering with a key vendor in this space to protect our customers and also give them the OneStopIT premium service they are used to,” said Ally Hollins-Kirk, CEO of OneStopIT.
Email archiving solutions have been developed by many cloud service providers, but prices can vary considerably between products, even between products that include a virtually identical set of features. Finding the best value email archiving solution for your business can be a challenge.
While the difference in price may only be a dollar or two per user, when multiplied by the number of employees in the organization the cost difference can be of the order of several thousand dollars a year.
To help you get the best possible price on email archiving, we have created a 2019 email archiving price comparison grid. The grid includes some of the leading names in email archiving and gives a typical price per user per month and per year, along with the total annual cost for a business with 100 mailboxes. The prices were taken from price lists available on 04/05/2018.
As you can see from the grid, TitanHQ’s email archiving solution, ArcTitan, is very competitively priced and is an affordable solution for most businesses. Being cloud-based, an email archive is quick and easy to set up and no hardware or software is required.
2019 Email Archiving Costs
Key Features of ArcTitan
100% cloud-based – No hardware or software is required
No limits on numbers or storage space
Virtually unlimited scalability
Enhances Search and Storage functionality of Office 365
Rapid archiving – Processes 200 emails a second
Lightning fast searches – ArcTitan can search millions of emails a second.
Intuitive design ensures easy use by all employees on desktop and mobile
Full audit trail maintained
Remote access to the archive from authorized users from any location or device
Full protection against data loss and mail server outages with automatic backups
Industry-leading customer support
Facilitates policy-based access rights and role-based access
Only pay for active users
Slashes the time and cost of eDiscovery other formal searches
Migration tools to ensure the integrity of data during transfer
Seamless integration with Outlook
Supports, single sign-on
Save and combine searches
Perform multiple searches simultaneously
Limits IT department involvement in finding lost email
Compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, etc.
As with all other TitanHQ solutions, we offer all visitors a free demonstration of ArcTitan in action. This gives businesses an opportunity to see the full product and all the product features. During the demo, businesses have access to an experienced engineer who can answer any questions you have about email archiving solutions.
At the end of the demo, if you are happy with what you have seen, you can purchase a license and start using ArcTitan within minutes. If you are not happy for any reason, there is no obligation to proceed with a purchase and TitanHQ will wish you the best of luck with your search for an alternative solution.
If you have any questions about ArcTitan, or to book a product demonstration, contact TitanHQ today.
FAQs
Why do I need an archive if I backup my email?
Backups and email archives are not the same. Backups protect against catastrophic failure and allow mailboxes to be restored to a certain point in time. You cannot easily search a backup, so recovering emails can be an incredibly labor-intensive and time-consuming process and backups may not be adequate if emails need to be provided for court cases.
Are there any hidden email archiving costs?
One ‘hidden’ cost with many email archiving service providers is the need to continue to pay for archiving for all mailboxes, even if an employee leaves the company. Over time, that cost can build up, especially if you have a high staff turnover. With ArcTitan you only pay for the number of active mailboxes and you also benefit from very competitive email archiving pricing.
Is hosted email archiving pricing more expensive than on-premises?
That will largely depend on the number of mailboxes and email volume. For most businesses, once storage space, IT support and maintenance, and backups are factored in, hosted email archiving is usually the most cost-effective and easiest option. Hosted email archiving can be paid for monthly and there are no start-up costs. With on-premise archiving you need to purchase and implement the hardware and software.
What else should I consider when selecting an email archiving service provider?
Our email archiving service cost comparison includes the major providers of cloud-based email archiving for businesses and MSPs as a guide to show you the cost savings. You also need to consider how easy the solutions are to use and how quickly messages can be found in the archive. We are convinced you will love the performance of ArcTitan, which is why we encourage you to take advantage of the free demo.
Do you provide help with migrating an existing email archive?
All ArcTitan customers benefit from industry-leading customer support. If you need help migrating your email archive from an existing service provider, expert technical support is on hand from our team of highly skilled engineers. Full support is also provided during the free demo to ensure you get the most out of ArcTitan.
New figures have been released by the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on 2018 Business Email Compromise attacks. The latest FinCEN report highlighted the pervasiveness of the threat and potential for the attacks to result in serious financial harm.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks are concerned with gaining access to a business email account and using that account to send messages to other individuals in an organization and business contacts. While compromised email accounts can be used for a variety of purposes, with BEC the primary goal is usually to convince an employee to make a fraudulent wire transfer or send sensitive information such as employee W-2 Forms.
Social engineering techniques are used to obtain the credentials of a high-level executive and convince an employee to make a fraudulent transfer. While at face value these scams are simplistic – they involve sending an email that requests a bank transfer be made – the scams are often highly sophisticated.
More than $300 Million a Month Was Lost to 2018 Business Email Compromise Attacks
The FinCEN report shows why these attacks are worth the effort. The average fraudulent transaction value in 2018 was $125,439 and $310 million per month was lost to BEC scams in 2018.
FinCEN received approximately 1,100 suspicious activity reports in 2018 that were attributed to BEC scams. It should be taken into consideration that many businesses are not obliged to report security breaches such as BEC scams, so the total losses will be considerably higher.
BEC attacks are also being conducted far more frequently and losses to the scams have skyrocketed. The 2016 FinCEN report indicates at least $110 million was lost to BEC scams. Losses to BEC scams have increased by 172% increase in just two years.
There has been a marked change in BEC scam tactics over the last two years, which has helped to increase the dollar amount of each fraudulent transaction.
As previously mentioned, the scams involve compromising an email account, which was commonly the email account of the CEO or CFO. The email accounts were used to send wire transfer requests and the average transaction value was $50,272. The 2018 figures show that there has been a shift from attacks that impersonate the CEO to attacks impersonating contractors and other vendors.
If a vendor’s email account is compromised, fake invoices can be sent to all companies that the vendor works for. Further, the typical amount of a vendor invoice is substantially higher than the transfer amounts typically requested by CEOs.
FinCEN’s figures show the average fake invoice transaction value was $125,439 for fake invoices from contractors, which is $75,167 more than the typical CEO email request.
FinCEN’s 2017 figures indicate 33% of BEC attacks involved impersonation of the CEO, but the percentage had fallen to just 12% in 2018. 39% of all BEC attacks in 2018 involved the impersonation of an outside entity such as a business associate, contractor, or vendor.
How to Improve Defenses Against BEC Attacks
With attacks increasing and losses spiraling, businesses need to take steps to reduce risk by improving email security and providing further training to employees. Employees should be made aware of the risk of BEC attacks, told about the latest threats, and should be taught how to identify a scam email. Policies should also be developed and implemented which require verification of all emailed transfer requests and bank account changes.
Training and policies will help to create a strong last line of defense, but the primary goal should be blocking the scam emails at the email gateway to ensure end users are not tested. That requires a powerful anti-spam service such as SpamTitan. SpamTitan blocks more than 99.97% of all spam and malicious emails to keep business inboxes threat free.
For further information on SpamTitan and other cybersecurity protections to reduce the risk of phishing and BEC attacks, contact TitanHQ today.
There are several common misconceptions about email archiving which are preventing many businesses from creating an email archive. It is often only when email data needs to be recovered that businesses realize just how important an email archive is. Of course, by then it is too late.
In this post we debunk some of the email archiving myths and explain why email archiving is now essential for almost all businesses, regardless of industry or business size.
Misconception #1: An Email Archive is the Same as a Backup
The recent increase in ransomware attacks has highlighted the importance of creating backups of all critical data. An email backup contains all messages in a mailbox. If anything happens to that mailbox – it is encrypted by ransomware for instance – all email data can be recovered.
An email archive could serve the same purpose but differs in some very important ways. An email archive serves as a depository for all emails that are no longer required but need to be retained to meet state and federal data retention requirements.
If an email, group of emails, needs to be recovered, the messages can be located and restored very quickly. That is because the archive includes email metadata and the archive is searchable. A backup is intended for mass email recovery. Finding individual emails in a backup can be incredibly time consuming, costly, and difficult.
You can restore emails from a backup following a ransomware attack, but for eDiscovery and dealing with customer complaints, an email archive is required.
Misconception #2: Email Archives are Only Necessary in Highly Regulated Industries
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) requires organizations maintain an audit trail for 7 years, which includes email communications. However, it is not only organizations covered by SOX that must retain emails. Several states have enacted laws that require email data to be retained for a set period of time.
Further, no company is immune to litigation. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require email communications to be produced as part of eDiscovery. Those communications must be found and provided quickly, which is only possible with an email archive. The failure to produce emails can result in significant financial penalties.
Misconception #3: Email Archives Must be Stored On-Premises
There is no law that states email archives must be housed on-premises, but many companies mistakenly believe that this is necessary. They then purchase expensive hardware and software to create an on-premises email archive. This is often out of security concerns as IT departments feel they can better protect email data in house.
However, cloud service providers offer the same if not greater security, and their solutions require no hardware purchases nor ongoing hardware and software maintenance. Businesses are therefore paying unnecessarily high prices for their email archive.
There is no need to purchase expensive hardware to store sizable email archives and resources do not need to be made available to maintain the hardware and software. On-premises systems also tend to lack flexibility, whereas cloud-based email archives are extremely scalable. When greater capacity is required, additional storage space is always available.
Many businesses only retain emails for a limited period of time, such as 90 days, after which messages are permanently deleted. There is a common view that If an email is deleted, it cannot cause any harm. However, if a complaint is received or emails need to be produced for eDiscovery, the failure to produce those messages could see a company liable for data destruction.
If you want to meet compliance requirements, reduce costs, and be able to recover email data instantly, an email archive is required.
ArcTitan: The Easy Way to Implement a Cloud Email Archive
TitanHQ offers a powerful, fast, and easy to use archiving solution that allows customers to securely store email data in the cloud. ArcTitan is a set and forget solution that serves as a black box flight recorder for email. Whenever an email needs to be found, you are selected for a compliance audit, or receive and eDiscovery request, the archive can be quickly searched and emails can be recovered in seconds or minutes. Emails are sent to the archive at a rate of around 200 messages a second and searches of the archive can be performed at a rate of up to 30 million messages a second.
With ArcTitan emails are sent to the archive in real-time when they arrive at your mail server. An exact copy of the email is sent to the archive, messages are de-duplicated, compressed and sent to Replicated Persistent Storage on Amazon AWS S3 and the archive is automatically backed up to ensure they can always be recovered. With ArcTitan there are no software updates to be performed, as that is handled by TitanHQ. A full audit log is maintained and you can prove that any emails produced have not been altered – Which is essential for compliance and eDiscovery requests.
Some of the key features of ArcTitan are listed below:
Scalable, email archiving that grows with your business
Email data stored securely in the cloud on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3
Lightning fast searches – Search 30 million emails a second
Rapid archiving at up to 200 emails a second
Automatic backups of the archive
Email archiving with no impact on network performance
Ensure an exact, tamperproof copy of all emails is retained
Easy data retrieval for eDiscovery
Protection for email from cyberattacks
Eliminate PSTs and other security risks
Facilitates policy-based access rights and role-based access
Only pay for active users
Slashes the time and cost of eDiscovery other formal searches
Migration tools to ensure the integrity of data during transfer
Seamless integration with Outlook
Supports, single sign-on
Save and combine searches
Perform multiple searches simultaneously
Limits IT department involvement in finding lost email
Compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, etc.
To find out more about the benefits of email archiving and for further information on ArcTitan. Contact TitanHQ today.
The past few months have seen an increase in reported cyberattacks on ships. The rise in cyberattacks on the commercial shipping network has prompted the U.S. Coast Guard to issue a warning.
This is the second such warning to be issued by the U.S. Coast Guard in the past three months. Together with a recent shipping industry report, they confirm that shipping companies and commercial vessels are being targeted by hackers and many of those attacks are succeeding.
Ships are now largely controlled by computers and mouse clicks and there is increasing reliance on electronic navigation systems. It is now common for operational technology and information technology to be linked together via onboard networks and certain systems are now connected to the internet. When devices are networked and connect to the Internet, hackers are given the opportunity to attack.
The cyberattack that prompted the latest warning occurred in February 2019. A ship bound for the Port of New York started experiencing severe disruption to its shipboard network. Vessel control systems were not affected, although the functionality of the network was severely degraded. The U.S. Coast Guard led a forensic investigation which revealed malware had been installed on the network.
The ship was known to be vulnerable to attack so the crew did not typically use the network for personal matters such as email. The network was only used for business purposes, which involved contact with third parties to maintain charts, manage cargo data, and communicate with shore-side facilities. It is currently unclear how the malware was installed, but what is clear is that cybersecurity defenses were nowhere near sufficient.
The advice from the Coast Guard is to implement network segmentation to limit the harm that can be caused in the event of an attack. Network profiles should be created for each user, and the rule of least privilege should be applied. Anti-virus software should be installed, all software should be kept up to date, and care should be taken connecting any external device to a networked computer due to the risk of malware.
If hackers can gain access to the network, they can steal sensitive data, cause serious disruption to internal networks, and systems could even be rendered inoperable. An extortion attack involving ransomware, for instance, could leave shipping firms with no alternative other than to pay up.
These attacks are the latest in a string of cyberattacks on commercial vessels. In December 2018, 21 shipping associations and industry groups produced a set of guidelines on cybersecurity onboard ships to help commercial vessel operators improve security, secure their networks, and make it difficult for hackers.
The report details recent USB-based attacks, RDP-based attacks, phishing attacks, ransomware attacks, and attacks involving malware, viruses, and worms. The attacks have caused major delays to shipping firms, financial losses, and in some cases have jeopardized safety.
Just as captains must make sure that access to the engine room is restricted, the same should be the case for computer systems. If systems are not secured, cyberattacks are inevitable.
TitanHQ can help shipping firms protect against email and web-based attacks and block the two main vectors that are used to attack commercial vessels.
Contact the team today to ask about SpamTitan and WebTitan: TitanHQ’s award winning antispam and DNS filtering solutions.
A serious outage has affected the spam filtering service, OnlyMyEmail, leaving customers without spam protection for several days.
The spam filtering service, also known as MXDefender, suddenly stopped working on Thursday and customers have been left in the dark about what has happened. Many have taken to online forums and social media to find answers but have only found hundreds of other customers asking the same questions. Customers have not been able to submit support tickets, the website is down, and the phone lines have been jammed.
MSPs know all too well that their clients are vulnerable to attack while their spam filtering service is down. Without the filter in place, spam, phishing, and malware-laced emails can flood into inboxes. All it takes is for one employee to respond to one of those messages for a costly breach to occur.
Several MSPs on forum such as Spiceworks have expressed their frustration about the prolonged outage and have already had to move their clients to alternative service providers to ensure they are protected until the issues are resolved. Two large MSPs have already switched to SpamTitan as a result of the OnlyMyEmail outage.
TitanHQ has received many enquiries about SpamTitan since the OnlyMyEmail service went down, as customers seek an alternative solution to protect their inboxes from email threats and spam. Many have given up waiting for an answer from OnlyMyEmail.
If you are a managed service provider or business that has been affected by the outage, it is important to implement a replacement spam filtering solution as soon as possible. The failure to do so will leave you extremely vulnerable to attack.
TitanHQ has developed an award-winning anti-spam and anti-phishing solution that has been shown to block more than 99.9% of spam in independent tests.
The 2019 G2 Crowd Report on Email Security Gateways named SpamTitan the leader for customer satisfaction. 97% of users awarded the product 4 or 5 stars and 92% of users would recommend the product to others.
TitanHQ ranked top for quality of support with an overall score of 94% – 10% more than the average score for support. SpamTitan clearly outperformed products from likes of Cisco, Barracuda, Mimecast, and SolarWinds.
SpamTitan is available as a cloud-based solution or gateway solution running on a virtual machine on your own hardware. MSPs have a range of hosting options and the solution can be easily integrated into existing MSP systems using TitanHQ’s APIs.
If you want an easy to implement anti-spam solution that provides enterprise-class protection at an affordable SMB price, SpamTitan is the ideal choice.
Sign up for the free trial and you can be protected in minutes.
A phishing campaign targeting university employees has already claimed several victims and has seen many email accounts compromised.
Emails are tailored to the institution and use a range of social engineering tricks to convince employees to click a link in the email and enter their Office 365 login credentials to access online content. The credentials are captured and used to gain access to university email accounts.
Once credentials have been obtained, a treasure trove of sensitive data can be plundered. Emails and email attachments contain personally identifiable information of staff, students, and parents, which can be used to commit identity theft and other fraudulent acts. Proprietary information can be obtained, along with details of contacts. The compromised accounts can also be used to conduct further phishing attacks on the university and externally on business contacts and other educational institutions.
Campaigns convincing users to install malware can give the attackers full control of university computers and a foothold to move laterally throughout the network. Access to university email accounts and backdoors in university computers are sold on the dark web, along with a range of stolen and forged university documents.
The healthcare industry is heavily targeted by cybercriminals due to the high value of health data. Health data is versatile and can be used for a multitude of fraudulent purposes. It also has a long-life span and can be used for much longer than financial information. Cybercriminals are also now realizing the potential rewards from attacks on universities. Student data is similarly versatile, and the wealth of data stored in university email accounts provides plenty of opportunities for profit.
Oregon State University is the latest university to announce it is the victim of a phishing attack. The Office 365 email account of an employee was compromised, through which the attacker had access to the records of 636 students. The account was used to send phishing emails to other entities throughout the United States.
Graceland University in Iowa and Southern Missouri State University recently announced that several email accounts had been compromised in recent phishing attacks, which would have allowed access to be gained to sensitive information.
It is unclear whether this is a single campaign or part of a wave of separate attacks on universities. What is clear is the attacks are increasing, so universities should take steps to improve email and web security.
Employees are being targeted so it is important to ensure that staff members are taught email security best practices and are shown how to identify phishing emails.
Technological defenses can also be improved to prevent malicious messages from arriving in Office 365 inboxes. As an additional protection, a DNS filter can be used to prevent users from accessing phishing websites and other known malicious web pages.
TitanHQ has developed powerful anti-phishing and anti-malware solutions for universities that help them protect against email and web-based attacks.
SpamTitan is a powerful anti-spam service that incorporates DMARC authentication and sandboxing to provide superior protection against impersonation and malware attacks for Office 365 users.
WebTitan is a DNS filtering solution that prevents users from accessing known malicious websites, such as those used for phishing and distributing malware.
To improve Office 365 phishing defenses and better protect your email accounts and networks from malware attacks, contact TitanHQ for further information on these two powerful cybersecurity solutions for educational institutions.
The largest managed service provider conference of 2019 will be taking place in San Diego on 17-19 June.
DattoCon is the premier conference for MSPs, bringing together a plethora of vendors and industry experts to help MSPs learn business building secrets, gain invaluable product insights, and learn technical best practices. The networking and learning opportunities at DattoCon are second to none. DattoCon19 is certainly an event not to be missed.
TitanHQ is a Datto Select Vendor and a proud sponsor of DattoCon19. TitanHQ has developed cybersecurity solutions to exactly meet the needs of MSPs. All solutions area easy to implement and maintain and can be integrated into MSP’s existing systems via a suite of APIs. TitanHQ provides the web security layer to Datto DNA and D200 boxes and is the only third-party security company trusted to work with Datto.
The TitanHQ team will be on hand at the conference to discuss your email and web security needs and will offer practical advice to help you better serve the needs of your customers and get the very most out of TitanHQ solutions.
Visitors to the TitanHQ stand (booth 23) will have the opportunity to learn about TitanHQ’s exclusive TitanShield Program for MSPs. Through the TitanShield program, members have access to SpamTitan email security and phishing protection; the WebTitan DNS filter; and the ArcTitan email archiving solution. Around 2,000 MSPs have already signed up to the program and are using TitanHQ solutions to protect their clients.
If you currently use Cisco Umbrella to provide web and malware protection, you may be paying far more for security than is necessary and could well be struggling with product support. Be sure to speak to the team about the savings from switching and the support provided by TitanHQ. A visit will also be useful for MSPs that are currently supporting Office 365, as the team will explain how spam, phishing and malware protection can be enhanced.
TitanHQ Executive Vice President-Strategic Alliances, Rocco Donnino, will be on the panel for the new, Datto Select Avendors event on Monday. The event runs from 3PM to 4PM and brings together experts from several select companies who will help solve some of the epic problems faced by MSPs today.
Additional Benefits at DattoCon19
New TitanHQ customers benefit from special show pricing.
A daily raffle for a free bottle of vintage Irish whiskey.
Two DattoCon19 parties: TitanHQ and BVOIP are sponsoring a GasLamp District Takeover on Monday 6/17 and Wed, 6/19.
DattoCon Details
DattoCon19 will be taking place in San Diego, California on June 17-19, 2019
If you are not yet registered for the event you can do so here.
TitanHQ will be at booth 23
The global user review website, G2, is the go-to place to find reviews of business software and services. Unlike many other review websites, G2 gives users of the software and services the opportunity to provide their feedback on how the products perform. Millions of businesses use the website to make smarter buying decisions and select the best products and services to meet their needs.
This year, for the first time, G2 has launched a new Best Software Companies in EMEA list. To produce the list, G2 used the reviews of more than 66,000 users of the products of more than 900 companies. To be selected as one of the best companies is only possible if users of products and services have given their endorsement.
“G2’s ever-expanding breadth and depth of product, review, and traffic coverage provide over 5 million data points to help buyers navigate the complex world of digital transformation”, said G2 CEO Godard Abel. “In our Best Software Companies in EMEA list, we leverage this data to identify the companies our users tell us are best helping them reach their potential”.
TitanHQ has developed a suite of advanced cybersecurity solutions to keep businesses protected from email and web-based threats and help MSPs serving that market effortlessly provide managed cybersecurity services to their clients.
“TitanHQ earned its place on the list thanks to the value our customers place on the uncompromised security and real-time threat detection we provide,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, TitanHQ. “The overwhelmingly positive feedback from on G2 Crowd is indicative of our commitment to ensuring the highest levels of customer success.”
The French Value Added Distributor (VAD) Exer has partnered with TitanHQ and will start offering its email security, DNS filtering, and email archiving solutions to French VARs.
Exer specializes in network security, mobile security, and managed cybersecurity services and currently works with over 600 French VARs and integrators helping them improve security for their clients.
TitanHQ is a leading provider of email security and DNS filtering services to SMBs, and MSPs and VARs serving the SMB market. The company’s award-winning cybersecurity solutions are now used by more than 7,500 businesses and 1,500 MSPs around the world.
TitanHQ is keen to expand its footprint in France and collaboration with Exer will help the company achieve its aims.
“Our advanced threat protection for email and web security was designed to keep businesses productive and information secure. We are pleased to be offering the Exer partner community choice, enhanced functionality and greater overall value,” explained TitanHQ Executive VP, Rocco Donnino.
“Collaboration with TitanHQ is an opportunity to represent a brand internationally recognized on 3 key technologies: Web Content Filtering, Anti-Spam, and Email Archiving. We are eager to propose these security solutions to ours VARs,” explained Exer CEO, Michel Grunspan. “Our regional presence and our expertise will be our strength for asserting the presence of TitanHQ in the French market”
The collaboration will see Exer offer all three TitanHQ solutions to French VARs: SpamTitan, WebTitan, and ArcTitan.
SpamTitan offers superior protection against all email-based threats and blocked 7 billion spam emails in January 2019. The solution is regularly updated to ensure it continues to protect against the latest email threats. The most recent update saw the incorporation of DMARC and sandboxing to the solution.
WebTitan is a DNS filtering solution that allows businesses to block web-based threats and carefully control the web content that can be accessed by users, both on and off the network. In January, the solution blocked more than 60 million malicious websites to keep businesses protected.
ArcTitan is an email archiving solution that helps businesses meet their compliance requirements. The solution was used to securely archive 10 million emails in January 2019.
French VARs will be able to find out about TitanHQ solutions at Exer’s Tour De France, which commences in Lille on May 23, 2019 at Hameau de la Becque (09:00-13:00).
TitanHQ, the leading provider of spam filtering, web filtering, and email archiving solutions to SMBs and managed service providers (MSPs) has announced a new partner program has been launched: TitanShield.
The aim of the TitanShield Partner Program is to provide MSPs, cloud distributors, OEM partners, Wi-Fi providers, and Technology Alliance partners with all the tools and support they need to start offering TitanHQ solutions to their clients and to provide continued support.
The launch of the new program coincides with TitanHQ’s 20-year anniversary. For the past two decades, TitanHQ has been developing innovative cybersecurity solutions for SMBs and MSPs that serve the SMB market. The company started by developing anti-spam technologies for businesses in Ireland and has since grown into an award-winning global provider of cybersecurity solutions.
Over the course of the past year, TitanHQ has been working closely with partners to make it as easy as possible for them to sell, onboard, deliver, and managed advanced network security solutions directly to their client base. In fact, in the past 9 months, as a result of those efforts, TitanHQ has increased its partner base by 40%.
In addition to providing cutting edge cybersecurity solutions to protect against email and web-based attacks and meet compliance requirements, TitanHQ offers partners flexible pricing models, competitive margins, and a wealth of sales and technical resources to drive revenue growth.
Under the new partner program, all qualified partners will be assigned a dedicated account manager, a support team, and engineers. Partners also benefit from a full range of APIs that will enable them to incorporate TitanHQ products into their backend provisioning and management systems and will be provided with extensive sales enablement and marketing support, including lead generation resources.
“Our new TitanShield partner program allows us to separate partners into their specific areas so that we can make sure they are receiving best practices, simple pricing models and focused information for the markets and customers they serve,” explained TitanHQ Executive VP of Strategic Alliances, Rocco Donnino “Our program takes a unique and strategic approach for our partners and can be customized to fit all business models.”
MSPs and cloud providers who have not yet started offering TitanHQ solutions to their clients can find out more about the TitanShield program by emailing the team at partners@titanhq.com
Malware and ransomware attacks are causing major problems for businesses, but the biggest threat in terms of losses are business email compromise scams.
The 2018 Internet Crime Report from the FBI clearly shows how serious the threat of BEC attacks has become. In 2017, reported losses from BEC attacks reached $675 million. In 2018, losses to BEC scams doubled to reach a staggering $1.2 billion.
It is no surprised that so many cybercriminal gangs are conducting BEC attacks. In contrast to many other forms of cybercrime, BEC scams can be extremely profitable and they require little in the way of technical skill to perform. As with phishing attacks, they often involve an attacker sending an email to trick an individual into making a wire transfer.
The scams often start with a spear phishing email targeting an executive in a company. The aim of the initial phase of the attack is to gain access to that individual’s email account. Once the email account is compromised, emails are then sent to finance department employees or payroll staff requesting a wire transfer be made.
Highly convincing emails are sent, and since they come from a genuine internal email account, the recipient is less likely to question the request.
Large enterprises often make large wire transfers, so a sizable transfer request for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars may be authorized without question. There have even been cases where much more substantial wire transfers have been made. A town in New Jersey discovered that, as a result of a BEC attack, a transfer of $1 million had been made to a criminal’s account. In that case, the FBI was able to freeze the funds in time, but with many scams, funds are withdrawn before the scam is identified.
In many cases, the first step in the attack is skipped and emails are simply spoofed to make them appear to have been sent from within the organization, from a contractor, or another individual with a relationship with the targeted entity.
The tactics and techniques being used are constantly changing. In addition to requests for wire transfers, cybercriminals often request tax (W2) forms of employees. This year has also seen an increase in gift card related BEC attacks. Instead of requesting wire transfers, requests are made to send gift cards for iTunes and online retailers. Cybercriminals then exchange the gift cards for Bitcoin online.
Confidence fraud and romance scams were the second main cause of losses. $362 million was lost to those scams and investment-related scams resulted in losses of over $252 million.
The real estate sector was extensively targeted in 2018. Criminals have attempted to get deposits and payments for house purchases diverted, often posing as the buyer, seller, real estate agents, or lawyers.
Phishing attacks are also on the rise. In 2018, the FBI’s Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3) received 26,379 complaints about phishing, smishing, and vishing, More than $48 million was lost to those scams in 2018.
Many of these scams are either conducted over email or start with a phishing email. It is therefore important for businesses to implement solutions that protect the email gateway and block these attacks at source to prevent malicious messages from reaching end users. It is also essential to provide training to staff to ensure they if they do encounter a phishing email or other scam, they have the skills to identify it as such.
SpamTitan, TitanHQ’s business email security solution, has been named leader in the Spring G2 Crowd Grid Report for Email Security Gateways.
G2 Crowd is a peer-to-peer review platform for business solutions. G2 Crowd aggregates user reviews of business software and the company’s quarterly G2 Crowd Grid Reports provide a definitive ranking of business software solutions.
The amalgamated reviews are read by more than 1.5 million site visitors each month, who use the reviews to inform software purchases. To ensure that only genuine reviews are included, each individual review is subjected to manual review.
The latest G2 Crowd Grid Report covers email security gateway solutions. Gateway solutions are comprehensive email security platforms that protect against email-based attacks such as phishing and malware. The email gateway is a weak point for many businesses and it is one that is often exploited by cybercriminals to gain access to business networks. A powerful and effective email gateway solution will prevent the vast majority of threats from reaching end users and will keep businesses protected.
To qualify for inclusion in the report, email gateway solutions needed to scan incoming mail to identify spam, malware, and viruses, securely encrypt communications, identify and block potentially malicious content, offer compliant storage through archiving capabilities, and allow whitelisting and blacklisting to control suspicious accounts.
For the report, 10 popular email security gateway solutions were assessed from Cisco, Barracuda, Barracuda Essentials, Proofpoint, Mimecast, Symantec, McAfee, Solarwinds MSP, MobileIron, and TitanHQ. Customers of all solutions were required to give the product a rating in four areas: Quality of support, ease of use, meets requirements and ease of administration.
TitanHQ the leader in business email security, today announced it has been recognized as a leader in the G2 Crowd Grid? Spring 2019 Report for Email Security.
TitanHQ’s SpamTitan was named leader based on consistently high scores for customer satisfaction and market presence. 97% of users of SpamTitan awarded the solution 4 or 5 stars out of 5 and 92% said they would recommend SpamTitan to others.
SpamTitan scored 94% for quality of support and meeting requirements. The industry average in these two areas was 84% and 88% respectively. The solution scored 92% for ease of use against an industry average of 82%, and 90% for ease of admin against an average value of 83%.
“TitanHQ are honored that our flagship email security solution SpamTitan has been named a leader in the email security gateway category,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, TitanHQ. “Our customers value the uncompromised security and real-time threat detection. The overwhelmingly positive feedback from SpamTitan users on G2 Crowd is indicative of our commitment to ensuring the highest levels of customer success.”
If you want to improve email security without breaking the bank and want a solution that your IT staff will like using, SpamTitan is the ideal choice.
SpamTitan is available on a 100% free trial to allow you to try before committing to a purchase; however, if you have any questions about the solution, contact the TitanHQ team who will be happy to help and can schedule a product demonstration.
This week, TitanHQ has rolled out two new features for its award-winning email security solution SpamTitan: Sandboxing and DMARC email authentication.
TitanHQ developed the technology behind its email security solution more than 20 years ago and over the past two decades SpamTitan has received many updates to improve features for end users and increase detection rates.
SpamTitan already blocks more than 99.9% of spam and malicious emails to prevent threats from reaching end users’ inboxes. The level of protection SpamTitan provides against email attacks has made it the gold standard in email security for the SMB market and managed service providers serving SMBs.
In order to provide even greater protection against increasingly sophisticated email threats, TitanHQ added a new sandboxing feature. The next-generation sandboxing feature, powered by Bitdefender, provides SpamTitan customers with a safe environment to run in-depth analyses of suspicious programs and files that have been delivered via email.
New SpamTitan Sandboxing Service
The sandbox is a powerful virtual environment totally separate from other systems. When programs are run in the sandbox, they behave as they would on an ordinary endpoint and can be assessed for suspicious behavior and malicious actions without causing harm.
Prior to being sent to the sandbox, files are first analyzed using SpamTitan’s anti-malware technologies. Only files that require further analysis make it to the sandbox where they are safely detonated. Tactics used by malware to evade detection and avoid analysis are logged and flagged. Purpose-built, advanced machine learning algorithms they assess the files and check their actions against an extensive array of known threats from a range on online repositories in a matter of minutes.
If the file is confirmed as benign, it can be released. If the file is determined to be malicious, the sandboxing service automatically sends a report to the Bitdefender’s Global Protective Network and all further instances of the threat will then be blocked globally to ensure the file does not need to be analysed again.
Email sandboxing provides advanced protection against zero-day exploits, polymorphic threats, APTs, malicious URLs, new malware samples that have yet to be identified as malicious, and new threats that have been developed for undetectable targeted attacks.
Incorporation of this feature into SpamTitan gives customers advanced emulation-based malware analysis capabilities without having to purchase a separate sandboxing solution and ensures customers are protected against rapidly evolving advanced threats.
DMARC Email Authentication Added to SpamTitan
Email spoofing is the term given to the use of a forged sender address. Email spoofing is used to increase the likelihood of an email being delivered and opened by an end user. The email address of a known contact, well known company, or government organization is usually spoofed to abuse trust in that individual, brand, or organization.
DMARC authentication is now essential for all businesses and is a powerful control to prevent spoofing attacks. DMARC is used to check email headers to provide further information about the true sender of an email. Through DMARC, the message is authenticated as having been sent from the organization that owns the domain. If authentication fails, the message is rejected.
While SPF provides a certain degree of protection against email spoofing, DMARC is far more dependable. SpamTitan now incorporates DMARC authentication to provide even greater protection against email spoofing attacks.
Both of these new features have been added in the latest update to SpamTitan and are available to users at no extra cost.
“We have listened to requests from customers to have new features added to SpamTitan, and by far the most requested improvements are anti-spoofing technology and sandboxing,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, TitanHQ. “I’m delighted to say that both of these new features have now been added to provide enhanced security for customers at no extra cost.”
TitanHQ is on the road again and has kick started a busy 2019 schedule of conferences with events on both sides of the Atlantic.
On February 14, 2019, TitanHQ Alliance Manager Patrick Regan attended the TitanHQ-sponsored Datto Roadshow in Tampa, Florida, and has been meeting with MSP partners from the region to help them with their existing and new email security, DNS filtering, and email archiving projects. TitanHQ has been working very closely with Datto MSP partners to ensure they get the most out of TitanHQ products to better support their clients.
On the other side to the pond, TitanHQ Alliance Manager Eddie Monaghan kicked off a week at the IT Nation Q1 EMEA Meeting in London and has been meeting MSP clients and finding what is going in in their world.
TitanHQ Alliance Manager, Eddie Monaghan
At both locations and in the upcoming roadshow events the TitanHQ team is available to meet with prospective MSP partners to explain about TitanHQ’s award-winning email security (SpamTitan), web security (WebTitan) and email archiving (ArcTitan) solutions and how they can easily be slotted into MSPs security stacks to better help and protect their clients. Current MSP partners will be given tips to help them get the very most out of the products.
Partner with TitanHQ
TitanHQ is the leading provider of email and web security products for MSPs serving the SMB market and now provides its products to more than 1,500 MSP partners serving clients in more than 200 countries. The combination of SpamTitan and WebTitan allows MSPs to provide their clients with superior protection against malware, ransomware, phishing and other cyber threats.
All TitanHQ products have been developed to specifically meet the needs of MSPs and save them support and engineering time by blocking cyber threats at source.
TitanHQ has developed it’s TitanShield Program to help partners in a wide range of industry sectors take advantage of TitanHQ’s suite of products. The TitanShield Program consists of four elements which meet the needs of MSP, ISP, and technology partners:
The MSP Program: Allows MSPs and resellers adopt the TitanHQ platform and security solutions to provide TitanHQ products direct to their clients.
The OEM program: TitanHQ’s entire suite of products is supplied in white-label form ready to take your company’s branding.
The Technology Alliance Program: Allows tech companies to partner with TitanHQ to offer spam filtering, web filtering, and email archiving solutions to clients alongside their own products.
The Wi-Fi Program: A program for Wi-Fi providers allowing the incorporation of TitanHQ’s cloud-based WiFi content filtering solution partners’ WiFi services.
Over the coming few months, TitanHQ will be visiting Dublin, heading across the channel to the Netherlands, and will be travelling through the UK and United States. If you are a current MSP partner or are interested in finding out how TitanHQ products could benefit your clients and be slotted into your technology stack, be sure to come and meet the team at one the following events.
We look forward to seeing you at one of the roadshow events in 2019.
The 2019 Cybersecurity Survey conducted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) has highlighted healthcare email security weaknesses and the seriousness of the threat of phishing attacks.
HIMSS conducts the survey each year to identify attack trends, security weaknesses, and areas where healthcare organizations need to improve their cybersecurity defenses. This year’s survey confirmed that phishing remains the number one threat faced by healthcare organizations and the extent that email is involved in healthcare data breaches.
This year’s study was conducted on 166 healthcare IT leaders between November and December 2018. Respondents were asked questions about data breaches and security incidents they had experienced in the past 12 months, the causes of those breaches, and other cybersecurity matters.
Phishing attacks are pervasive in healthcare and a universal problem for healthcare providers and health plans of all sizes. 69% of significant security incidents at hospitals in the past 12 months used email as the initial point of compromise. Overall, across all healthcare organizations, email was involved in 59% of significant security incidents.
The email incidents include phishing attacks, spear phishing, whaling, business email compromise, and other email impersonation attacks. Those attacks resulted in network breaches, data theft, email account compromises, malware infections, and fraudulent wire transfers.
When asked about the categories of threat actors behind the attacks, 28% named ‘online scam artists’ and 20% negligence by insiders. Online scam artists include phishers who send hyperlinks to malicious websites via email. It was a similar story the previous year when the survey was last conducted.
Given the number of email-related breaches it is clear that anti-phishing defenses in healthcare need to be improved. HIPAA requires all healthcare employees to receive security awareness training, part of which should include training on how to identify phishing attacks. While this is a requirement for compliance, a significant percentage (18%) of healthcare organizations do not take this further and are not conducting phishing simulations, even though they have been shown to improve resilience against phishing attacks by reinforcing training and identifying weaknesses in training programs.
The continued use of out of date and unsupported software was also a major concern. Software such as Windows Server and Windows XP are still extensively used in healthcare, despite the number of vulnerabilities they contain. 69% of respondents admitted still using legacy software on at least some machines. When end users visit websites containing exploit kits, vulnerabilities on those devices can easily be exploited to download malware.
It may take some time to phase out those legacy systems, but improving healthcare email security is a quick and easy win. HIMSS recommends improving training for all employees on the threat from phishing with the aim of decreasing click rates on phishing emails. That is best achieved through training, phishing simulations, and better monitoring of responses to phishing emails to identify repeat offenders.
At TitanHQ, we can offer two further solutions to improve healthcare email security. The first is an advanced spam filtering solution that blocks phishing emails and prevents them from being delivered to inboxes. The second is a solution that prevents employees from visiting phishing and other malicious websites such as online scams.
SpamTitan is an advanced anti-phishing solution that scans all incoming emails using a wide range of methods to identify malicious messages. The solution has a catch rate in excess of 99.9% with a false positive rate of just 0.03%. The solution also scans outbound messages for spam signatures to help identify compromised email accounts.
WebTitan Cloud is a cloud-based web filtering solution that blocks attempts by employees to visit malicious websites, either through web surfing or responses to phishing emails. Should an employee click on a link to a known malicious site, the action will be blocked before any harm is caused. WebTitan also scans websites for malicious content to identify and block previously known phishing websites and other online scams. Alongside robust security awareness training programs, these two solutions can help to significantly improve healthcare email security.
For further information on TitanHQ’s healthcare email security and anti-phishing solutions, contact TitanHQ today.
G2 Crowd, the trusted business software review platform, has recognized SpamTitan as a High Performer for email security. The anti-spam solution has been praised for speed of implementation, ease of use, quality of support, and its spam filtering capabilities.
Finding the right software solution can take a lot of time and effort. Even when software is carefully and painstakingly reviewed, making a purchase can be risky. G2 Crowd helps businesses find the most suitable software and services and make informed buying decisions, taking the guesswork out of software selection.
The G2 Crowd platform contains more than half a million independent, authenticated reviews from users of software solutions that give honest feedback on software solutions after having put them through their paces. The platform is trusted by businesses and its user reviews are read by more than 2 million buyers every month.
This December, G2 Crowd released its Winter Secure Email Gateway Grid℠, which ranked SpamTitan as the highest performer in the mid-market segment. According to G2 Crowd, “High Performers provide products that are highly rated by their users,” and have achieved consistently positive reviews from the people that matter – customers.
The high position is due to consistent 5-star reviews from users. 93% of user-reviewers on the site have awarded SpamTitan 5 stars out of 5, with the remaining 7% giving the solution 4 stars out of 5. SpamTitan has attracted praise across the board, notably for how easy it is to set up, use, maintain, its reporting tools, the quality of customer support, and price.
SpamTitan has also been rated as a 5-star email security solution by users of Spiceworks and has won more than 37 consecutive Virus Bulletin Spam awards.
Not only is SpamTitan an ideal solution for SMBs to block spam email, malware, and phishing threats, it has been developed to also meet the needs of managed services providers to allow them to easily add spam filtering and phishing protection to their service stacks.
SpamTitan is available with three deployment choices: SpamTitan Gateway, SpamTitan Cloud, and SpamTitan Private Cloud, to meet the needs of all businesses.
Check out the SpamTitan reviews on G2 Crowd and contact TitanHQ to schedule a product demonstration. SpamTitan is also available on a free 14-day trial to allow you to test the solution for yourself in your own environment.
There has been an increase in phishing attacks on retailers, supermarket chains, and restaurants in recent weeks. The aim of the phishing attacks is to deliver remote access Trojans and remote manipulator software to gain persistent access to computers and, ultimately, obtain banking credentials and sensitive customer data on POS systems.
Several new campaigns have been detected in recent weeks targeting retail and food sector companies, both of which are well into the busiest time of the year. With employees working hard, it is likely that less care will be taken opening emails which gives cybercriminals an opportunity.
PUB Files Used in Phishing Attacks on Retailers
Over the past few weeks, security researchers have noted an uptick in phishing attacks on retailers, with one threat group switching to using.pub files to install malware. Many phishing attacks use Word documents containing malicious macros. The use of macros with .pub files is relatively uncommon. The change to this new attachment type may fool employees, as they will be less likely to associate these files with cyberattacks.
Social engineering techniques are used to fool end users into opening the files, with the .pub files masquerading as invoices. Many emails have been intercepted that appear to have been sent from within a company, which helps to make the files appear genuine.
If opened, the .pub files, via malicious macros, run Microsoft Installer (MSI) files that deliver a remote access Trojan. Since these installers will most likely be familiar to end users, they may not realize the installers are malicious. Further, the MSI files are time delayed so they do not run immediately when the .pub files are opened, increasing the probability that the RAT downloads will go unnoticed.
The TA505 threat group is using this tactic to install the FlawedAmmy remote access Trojan and other malicious payloads such as Remote Manipulator System (RMS) clients.
The phishing emails used to deliver these malicious files are targeted and tailored to a specific business to increase the likelihood of success. These targeted spear phishing attacks are now becoming the norm, as threat actors move away from the spray and pray tactics of old.
Cape Cod Community College Phishing Attack Results in Theft of More Than $800,000
Phishing attacks on retailers have increased, but other industries are also at risk. Educational institutions are also prime targets, as has been highlighted by a recent phishing attack on Cape Cod Community College.
The Cape Cod Community College phishing attack involved sophisticated messages that delivered malware capable of evading the college’s anti-virus software. The malware was used to obtain the banking credentials of the college, and once those credentials had been obtained, the hackers proceeded to make fraudulent transfers and empty bank accounts. Transfers totaling $807,130 were made, and so far, the college and its bank have only been able to recover $278,887.
All too often, fraudulent transfers are not detected quickly enough to recover any funds. Once the transfers have cleared the attacker-controlled bank accounts are emptied, after which the probability of recovering funds falls to near zero.
Defense in Depth the Key to Phishing Protection
Email is the primary vector used to phish for sensitive information and deliver malware to businesses. Regardless of whether businesses use local email systems or cloud-based email services such as Office 365, advanced spam filtering controls are required to block threats. For instance, SpamTitan blocks more than 99.9% of spam email and 100% of known malware. SpamTitan also uses heuristics, machine learning, and Bayesian analysis to identify previously unseen threats – One of the areas of weakness of Office 365’s anti-phishing defenses.
Network segmentation is also essential. Critical services must be separated to ensure that the installation of malware or ransomware on one device will not allow the attackers to gain access to the entire network. This is especially important for retailers and other businesses with POS systems. Network segmentation will help to keep POS systems and the financial data of customers secure.
Advanced endpoint protection solutions offer far greater protection than standard antivirus solutions and are less reliant on malware signatures. Standard AV solutions will only block known malware. With standard AV solutions, new malware variants can easily slip through the net.
End user security awareness training should be mandatory for all employees and training needs to be a continuous process. A once a year training session is no longer sufficient. Regular training throughout the year is required to ensure employees are made aware of the latest threats and tactics being used to gain access to login credentials and install malware.
For further information on improving email security to improve protection against phishing attacks, contact the TitanHQ team today.
Financial institutions, healthcare organizations and universities have seen an increase in cyberattack in recent months, but there has also been an increase in phishing attacks on publishers and literary scouting agencies.
Any business that stores sensitive information that can be monetized is at risk of cyberattacks, and publishers and literary scouting agencies are no exception. Like any employer, scouting agencies and publishers store sensitive information such as bank account numbers, credit card details, Social Security numbers, contract information, and W-2 Tax forms, all of which carry a high value on the black market. The companies also regularly make wire transfers and are therefore targets for BEC scammers.
However, in a somewhat new development, there have been several reports of phishing attacks on publishers and literary scouting agencies that attempt to gain access to unpublished manuscripts and typescripts. These are naturally extremely valuable. If an advance copy of an eagerly awaited book can be obtained before it is published, there will be no shortage of fans willing to pay top dollar for a copy. Theft of manuscripts can result in extortion attempts with ransoms demanded to prevent their publication online.
2018 has seen a significant increase in phishing attacks on publishers and literary scouting agencies. Currently, campaigns are being conducted by scammers that appear to have a good understanding of the industry. Highly realistic and plausible emails are being to publishing houses and agencies which use the correct industry terminology, which suggests they are the work of an industry insider.
One current campaign is spoofing the email account of Catherine Eccles, owner of the international literary scouting agency Eccles Fisher. Emails are being sent using Catherine Eccles’ name, and include her signature and contact information. The messages come from what appears to be her genuine email account, although the email address has been spoofed and replies are directed to an alternative account controlled by the scammer. The messages attempt to get other literary agencies to send manuscripts via email or disclose their website passwords.
An increase in phishing attacks on publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have been reported, with the threat already having prompted Penguin Random House North America to send out warnings to employees to alert them to the threat. According to a recent report in The Bookseller, several publishers have been targeted with similar phishing schemes, including Penguin Random House UK and Pan Macmillan.
Protecting against phishing attacks requires a combination of technical solutions, policies and procedures, and employee training.
Publishers and scouting agencies should deploy software solutions that can block phishing attacks and prevent malicious emails from being delivered to their employees’ inboxes.
SpamTitan is a powerful anti-phishing tool that blocks 99.97% of spam emails and 100% of known malware. DMARC email-validation is incorporated to detect email spoofing and prevent malicious emails from reaching employees’ inboxes.
End user training is also essential to raise awareness of the risks of phishing. All staff should be trained how to recognize phishing emails and other email threats to ensure they do not fall for these email scams.
If you run a publishing house or literary scouting agency and are interested in improving your cyber defenses, contact the TitanHQ team today for further information on cybersecurity solutions that can improve your security posture against phishing and other email and web-based threats.
TitanHQ has announced a new partnership with Pax8. The partnership means Pax8 partners now have access to TitanHQ’s cloud-based email security solution – SpamTitan – and its DNS filtering solution, WebTitan.
TitanHQ is a Datto Select Vendor and a proud sponsor of DattoCon19. TitanHQ has developed cybersecurity solutions to exactly meet the needs of MSPs. All solutions area easy to implement and maintain and can be integrated into MSP’s existing systems via a suite of APIs. TitanHQ provides the web security layer to Datto DNA and D200 boxes and is the only third-party security company trusted to work with Datto.
This year, for the first time, G2 has launched a new Best Software Companies in EMEA list. To produce the list, G2 used the reviews of more than 66,000 users of the products of more than 900 companies. To be selected as one of the best companies is only possible if users of products and services have given their endorsement.
The French Value Added Distributor (VAD) Exer has partnered with TitanHQ and will start offering its email security, DNS filtering, and email archiving solutions to French VARs.
