Fortinet, a high-performance cybersecurity solutions company, cautions businesses to safeguard against malware which is often spread via email.
Malware includes ransomware, spyware, computer viruses, and other malicious programs.
According to Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, malware is the number one attack vector for cybercrime. In fact, ransomware downloaders are among the most prevalent malware seen by FortiGuard Labs with new variants every day.
Today, there are over 2.6 billion email users worldwide and that figure will top 3 billion by the end of 2020. Market researcher The Radicati Group estimates the number of business and consumer emails sent per day will hit 258 billion by 2020. Cyber criminals are pouring unprecedented resources into creating malicious threats designed to cripple an organization. For businesses, the security of e-mail is still a major concern as it remains a primary delivery method.
Fortinet advises businesses to implement a secure e-mail system that not only keeps threats from getting in, but also keeps critical data from getting out. And with the speed that new malware threats are being created, one needs a protection system that is constantly being updated with the latest threat intelligence.
“If your secure email gateway service has been in place for more than two years, it probably is not designed to deal with threats such as ransomware,” said Michelle Ong, Fortinet’s Country Manager for Malaysia. “If any business has moved its e-mail protection to a cost-saving cloud-based e-mail security service, one may not be getting the latest protection from dedicated security experts.”
E-mail was invented some 47 years ago. The first electronic message was sent between a computer at UCLA and one at Stanford Research Institute on 29th October 1969 over the military communications network ARPANET, one of the world’s first computer networks and the earliest version of what is known today as the Internet.