Anti-phishing software is a set of computer programs used to identify and block the phishing content in emails, websites, apps, or other forms used to access data from the internet. It’s basically a set of software services that identifies malicious inbound messages impersonating a trusted entity or attempting to gain trust through social engineering, empowers users to take corrective action, and allows them to create blacklists and whitelists for message filtering. It’s an important aspect of email security, as it prevents malware, viruses, ransomware, and even zero-payload attacks from entering via email.
What Phishing Can Cost Your Business
Phishing has become a major hazard to both enterprises and consumers in recent years. According to a 2020 Verizon assessment, the use of malware and trojans has decreased, while attackers have shifted their focus to more efficient methods like phishing and credential theft. To deceive consumers and get dollars or monetizable data, attackers take advantage of user ignorance, mistaken trust, and human nature.
The following are some of the dangers you could face if you don’t have anti-phishing protection in place:
- Loss of Data: Employees share confidential information with a malevolent entity, mistaking them for a colleague or another trustworthy party, resulting in data loss.
- Credential Theft: Employees click on a malicious link or download a malicious program that monitors keystrokes or spoofs the actual account provider to get login credentials.
- Ransomware Infection: Employees open a malicious file attached to an email or download a malicious file from a URL given in the email, only to discover that their data has been encrypted until they pay a ransom.
- Wire Transfer Fraud: Employees believe the email sender legitimately and urgently requires a specified amount, so they wire-transfer the money straight.
Anti-Phishing Software Options
Given that the pandemic prompted a 600 percent increase in phishing attacks last year, phishing defense should be a high concern for businesses in 2021. Because attackers today use sophisticated social engineering techniques to abuse human psychology and defeat fixed-rules-based email filtering blocking systems, a basic spam filtering solution isn’t enough.
Here are some of the top software to defend your organization against various types of phishing attacks, and they cover a wide range of use cases.
Area 1 Horizon Anti-Phishing Service
The cloud-based service anti-phishing service offers protection from phishing on the web, email, and network-based vectors. Equipped with analytics and recommendations, the company has a singular platform that operates via APIs.
Suitable for: From single-user businesses to Fortune 50 companies with 100,000+ users, we’ve got you covered.
Features: Leverage the following features offered by Area 1 Horizon:
- Email phishing protection via geo-distributed, scalable mail transfer agent (MTA) service.
- Automated integration with Windows, BIND, and DNS servers. Flexible device connectors for firewalls, web proxies, or DNS gateways.
- Continuous learning and scoring across 100+ analytics models.
- Proprietary algorithms for emergent campaign identification and attack correlation. Mobile and roaming user protection
A major USP that you can look forward to with Area 1 Horizon is results-based pricing. The company only charges for the threats and attacks that are detected by the software, letting you link your cybersecurity investments to ROI.
Avanan Cloud Email Security
Avanan is an email security system that protects users from phishing attacks on any email client or instant messaging services, such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and others. It’s important for recognizing social engineering initiatives that don’t use standard email and instead employ collaboration channels.
Suitable for: Companies with a large number of collaborative apps.
Features: Cloud app integration for collaboration, email, messaging, and file-sharing tools are just a few of Avanan’s main features.
- Advanced threat patterns are used to train the core analysis model
- Using artificial intelligence to find connections between personnel, emailing patterns, and communication
- A unified threat management interface with policy control across the board
- TLS-encrypted OAuth token-based communication with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps
- A team of professionals to respond quickly to an incident.
When identifying or stopping phishing attacks, Avanan has the unique capacity of not changing mail exchanger records or MX records. As a result, attackers won’t be able to tell if you’re using anti-phishing software and devise a plan to get beyond the protection measures.
Cofense
Cofense is an anti-phishing company that provides a variety of products to combat phishing threats. A learning management system for awareness training, a phishing detection and reporting service, staff resilience, and phishing threat intelligence are among the features included.
Suitable for: Regular awareness training is required for organizations with a large staff, in addition to anti-phishing software.
Features: You can benefit from the following features when you use Cofense:
- Over 25 million global threat reports for a constantly updated threat database Integrations with endpoint security, next-generation firewalls, SIEM, and SOAR systems or Email quarantine service to automatically detect and isolate threats
- Phishing threat simulations to help employees become more resilient
- SPAM engine and automated phishing email analysis
- Employee interface to aid in the detection of phishing attempts.
Cofense provides customized solutions for a variety of industries, including healthcare, financial services, energy and utilities, retail, manufacturing, and government. Cofense’s bespoke solutions can be used by organizations who do not have a mature in-house IT team.
GreatHorn
This cloud-based email security service safeguards you against phishing attempts on Office 365 and G Suite, including spear phishing, BEC, and emails containing malware or ransomware. AI and machine learning are at the heart of GreatHorn’s anti-phishing software.
Suitable for: SMBs and large organizations that need flexible email security.
Features: You can use GreatHorn to use the following features:
- Real-time incident search and remediation capabilities
- RESTful API for interacting with your existing security solutions
- On-by-default threat detection and automated quarantine
- End-user awareness through banners, real-life alerts, policy violations, and more
- Suspicious link previews and contextualized notifications
- Managed email security and custom policies specified by experts.
GreatHorn uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation to analyze a proprietary dataset containing hundreds of millions of reported threats. This gives it access to accurate and up-to-date threat intelligence.
Proofpoint Email Security and Protection
Proofpoint is a well-known cybersecurity solutions provider, and its email solution is quite extensive. It guards against phishing and impostor emails while also allowing you to track the origin of communications.
Suitable for: Proofpoint-dependent small to midsize organizations and corporations, as well as those handling sensitive data.
Features: The following are some of the important characteristics of Proofpoint email security:
- Impostor, phishing, malware, spam, bulk mail, adult material, and circle of trust email classifications
- Email warning tags to assist consumers in making educated decisions
- Multi-layered detection techniques, including reputation and content analysis
- Graymail (e.g., newsletters and bulk mail) identification with granular email filtering o Proofpoint NexusAI to assess sender reputation
- Admin controls for managing encrypted messages/low-priority and taking actions
The key benefit of Proofpoint email security is that it can be used in conjunction with other Proofpoint email security solutions like Threat Response Auto-Pull (TRAP) and Email Fraud Defense. This allows you to construct an end-to-end secure communication environment that meets your needs.
A lot of other software & services are also available to prevent or handle phishing attacks including Sophos Email Security, Zerospam, Mimecast, IRONSCALES, Barracuda Sentinel, RSA FraudAction, and BrandShield Anti-Phishing. To know about them in detail, you can refer to this blog:
How to Choose Anti-Phishing Software for Your Business
Phishing attacks are getting more sophisticated each day. To choose anti-phishing software, you need to consider all potential ways that phishers can use to attack your business. An anti-phishing software must have these essential features: Spam Filters, Customized Filtering Rules, Malicious File Identification, and Malicious URL detection. In addition, you can also consider the following features (if required for your business) while selecting an anti-phishing software for your business:
- Protection for productivity applications such as Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive, etc.
- Phishing site detection, credential reuse detection, and alert for compromised accounts
- Protection for mobile devices as mobile phones have social media, email apps, official communication platforms, etc.
How XO Can Help
XO is the one-stop solution for all your data security requirements. From security audits to initial setup, 24/7/365 monitoring to 24/7/365 management, we do it all. Our Rapid Incident Response team often takes less than a minute to respond to critical alerts and issues. Even if your accounts have been stolen due to a phishing attack, we assure complete recovery of all the stolen accounts. Beyond that, XO provides email review services, setting up DKIM, MFA, and anti-phishing policies to completely secure your business operations.
Visit our official website today to schedule a meeting.
