1. Close the window of exposure
The threat landscape moves incredibly quickly these days with new threats being born every minute. Look for an email security solution that offers real-time classification in order to catch the threats as they happen. On average 26% daily threats are protected using ThreatSeeker intelligence (from Websense) before AV (Antivirus ) signatures were available. In the month of May this year, 204 thousand instances of 81 unique zero-day threats were stopped by ThreatSeeker before AV.
2. Don’t fall for social engineering scams
Cleverly wrapped social engineering scams use highly customized phishing emails and recently we’ve seen some diversification of social engineering in malicious spam. Spammers have abused big brand names to entice possible victims into clicking on URLs in messages. In May 2010 approximately 85% of all email was spam (Source – Websense Security Labs) and in the last few months we saw lures involving Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, Amazon, Adobe, and even job applications. Along with malicious attachments, embedded malicious links in email is a major threat, Our analysis shows that in May alone 93% of spam included an embedded URL . Most email solution do not adequately protect against these.
