Email sure has come up a lot in recent years. Amazingly, as email usage has dropped, the dangers of email has increased. Payloads are less likely to be Nigerian Prince scams and more likely to be ransomware deployments. How we think about email today is very different than it was just a few years ago. Spam itself might be dropping off as people and technology get better and better at identifying it and stopping it; but ransomware is so effective that it accounts more than ever as the key danger being delivered in email.

In general, traditional viruses, trojans, worms, direct hacking all seem to be taking a back seat to the dangers of email delivered malware. End users and complex email systems have made email a very strategic attack vector because it allows outside attackers direct access to the greatest point of vulnerability: the end users.

Your choice of email platform, and your choice of email filtering are key factors in how your users will be able to and need to defend themselves.

What do you think? Do you see email as the same as it always has been? Has it gotten safer? Or has it gotten more dangerous than ever before?

Email security is quite the challenge. Just training users isn't enough. It helps, of course. In fact, it is the best thing we have today. But even trained users can forget, make mistakes, or just be tricked anyway. Training isn't magic, it just helps us to improve our existing defenses which, aren't really all that good. The ability to trick people is pretty strong. People have pretty poor defenses against any degree of sophisticated trickery.

So what can we do? Malware scanners can't be the answer alone. Not all attacks are malware, and not all malware gets caught. Spam filtering can't do it along, most dangerous email isn't actually spam. User training can't do it alone, users are gullible and easily confused or else we'd never have needed to train them in the first place. Putting loads of these things together, along with forced TLS, checking blacklists and SPF records and more all help. Layers of security, as people say. But as we know, it all adds up to still being pretty heavily at risk.

So MailBear is proposing a new solution. Two factor email verification. Basically a system by which when an email is sent, there is an ID code included in it that the receiver can use to reference the message; more or less a UUID. Then the receiver, upon receipt of the message, reaches out automatically either to a person or an automated system to ask if that system had, in fact, sent that message with that ID. This is done via a totally separate channel such as SMS, and essentially acts as a two factor mechanism.

By doing so, the recipient of the email would have an incredibly strong trust that, once verified, the email had truly come from the person in question. It does nothing to protect against malware in case that other person's machine had been infected; but it does ensure that the other party did, in fact, intend to send the message protecting against things like spam and phishing or automated attacks.

Remember that MailBear is always here, always working on the latest technology.

I've been reading Goldilocks and the Three Email Systems. It's an engaging story of different email platforms and an IT Director, named Goldilocks, who is looking for the right mix of cost and features that is just right for her organization.

As a bear, I'm kind of a Putin fan.

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Hey guys, long time, no see.