New Survey: 53% Predict Their Organization Will Suffer from an Email-borne Attack in 2018

SAN FRANCISCO, April 17, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mimecast Limited (NASDAQ:MIME), a leading email and data security company, today announced enhancements to its Targeted Threat Protection services - Impersonation Protect, URL Protect, and Internal Email Protect – engineered to combat and remediate the evolving threat landscape. New features include supply chain impersonation protection, similar domain detection, the integration of new automated intelligence feeds, as well as the introduction of automated threat remediation capabilities. New research from Mimecast and Vanson Bourne revealed that organizations are not only facing a variety of different threats, but the volume and frequency of these attacks continue their upward trajectory. In fact, 53 percent expect a negative business impact from these email-borne threats in 2018.

Impersonation attacks commonly use social engineering, and are designed to trick users such as finance managers, executive assistants, and HR representatives into making wire transfers or providing information which can be monetized by cybercriminals. Normally, these attacks target people from within the same company; however, attackers have started to impersonate senders from so called trusted third parties that the target company does business with regularly. New Mimecast and Vanson Bourne research found that 40 percent of the 800 IT-decision makers who responded said they saw an increase of these types of attacks over the past 12 months. Impersonation Protect, from Mimecast, will offer supply chain impersonation protection to guard companies against similar or lookalike 3^rd party email domains, helping to stop these attacks before they could cause any issue.

Lookalike domains are also increasingly becoming a problem, as recently publicized in top media outlets, like KrebsonSecurity. Attackers are now using non-western character sets to display letters that look identical to the naked eye, such as the Cyrillic “а” in comparison to the Western “a”. This tactic helps to mask the true destination of a link. Mimecast has incorporated new capabilities within Impersonation Protect and URL Protect that are designed to use new algorithms to protect internal users from similar or lookalike domains.

New real-time data feeds have also been added to Impersonation Protect engineered to better identify newly observed and registered domains to further enhance Mimecast’s ability to detect security threats. Additionally, using Mimecast’s global threat intelligence network, Internal Email Protect can help customers more quickly remediate security threats that originate from any email account inside or outside the organization. Internal Email Protect will constantly monitor and re-check the status of all file attachment “fingerprints” globally. If the security posture of a delivered file changes, the service is designed to quickly alert and update administrators, automatically or manually remediate attachment-based malware and will log incident actions.

“Cybercriminals are constantly looking for new ways to be stealthy and trick users, which was the key driver for us to enhance Targeted Threat Protection with these new capabilities. Research found that 97 percent of respondents said maintaining email uptime is critical for business continuity, yet only 27 percent have adopted a cyber resilience strategy. In fact, for those that had suffered an email-based attack in the last year, the average recovery time was three days. That’s a long time, and, for many organizations, catastrophic,” said Ed Jennings, chief operating officer. “It is critical organizations have comprehensive security controls in place before, continuity during, and automated recovery after an attack to help them build cyber resilience for email.”

Available in June 2018, these new features will be delivered through Mime|OS, a 100 percent single cloud platform that underpins the Mimecast services, and via a single administration console with a simple to use user interface. Built using micro-services, Mime|OS allows customers to take advantage of the cost and performance benefits of industry-standard hardware and resource-sharing, specifically for the secure management of email and data.

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About Mimecast
Mimecast (NASDAQ:MIME) makes business email and data safer for thousands of customers and their millions of employees worldwide. Founded in 2003, the company's next-generation cloud-based security, archiving and continuity services protect email and deliver comprehensive email risk management.

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