Email Fatigue Puts Your Business One Click Away from Compromise
The daily business communications that once happened in person or over the office phone seem like a distant memory. Most business dialogues are now conducted via emails, online meetings, and other digital communications.
As a result of this shift, employees are not only dealing with astronomically higher volumes of emails, but emails from a wider range of sources from management and colleagues, new and existing suppliers and partners, and new and ongoing clients. On top of this, they are inundated with emails about new policies, products, and other information to support their remote working environments.
The convenience of email has also become a management challenge and risk factor. Employees suffering from email fatigue become less alert to anomalies and are more likely to click on malicious emails, exposing them to malware, phishing, and ransomware.
Because much of our daily business activity revolves around emails with links and attachments, hackers are ready to exploit user email fatigue, to gain unauthorized access into the corporate network.
Threat actors launch a wide variety of campaigns like phishing emails, to trick workers into clicking on a malicious link or attachment and enter their credentials. It just takes one employee to fall victim to a sophisticated phishing attack to enable a data breach. Hackers have successfully launched phishing emails impersonating government and non-government organizations, from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to government departments and pharmaceutical companies.
The FBI’s 2020 Internet Crime Report found that businesses and consumers lost a combined $1.7 billion due to compromised email attacks. But that was nothing. Nearly $7 billion was lost through Internet crimes in 2021, according to the FBI’s annual Internet Crime Report.
Every day, the message becomes clearer; organizations across industries must employ stronger email protections. The health industry is a prime example. Last year, Revere Health fell victim to a data breach when an employee clicked on a phishing email. The company had approximately 12,000 patient medical records exposed. In 2020, Magellan Health suffered a data breach due to a sophisticated social engineering attack when one of its clients enabled hackers to gain access to the health plan’s servers. The hacker launched a ransomware attack that impacted 1.7 million users, that included personal information on internal staff and customers. Health insurance company, Aetna Ace, had 480,000 patient records exposed after an employee responded to a spear-phishing email. The company had to pay $1 million in fines after investigators found the company violated HIPAA privacy rules as a result of the breach.
Governments and organizations are responding in an effort to de-escalate the rise of email attacks. Malicious email campaigns prompted the World Health Organization to disseminate communications warning users about phishing exploits. Likewise, the United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre also launched a campaign to be “cyber-aware” following the takedown of 2,000 scams, including 471 fake online shops peddling COVID 19-related services.
RevBits email security turns the tables on threat actors
RevBits flips the advantage by transforming threat surfaces into detection surfaces. To defend against all email threats, RevBits multilayered email security protects all entry points, from email servers to endpoint user inboxes. RevBits delivers end-to-end email security — in the cloud and on-premises, and across the network edge.
Email fatigue is plaguing every organization, and bad actors will take advantage of distracted and overwhelmed employees by targeting that fatigue. RevBits’ multilayered email defense protects against fatigue risks, by delivering superior protection against malicious and destructive email campaigns.
Click here to learn how RevBits Email Security can help protect your organization.
