Mimecast highlights the major role played by email in cyber crime

Mimecast recently held a cyber-crime seminar, in Nairobi, Kenya, to highlight how emails are a good way for cyber criminals to infiltrate organisations; the company revealed that, 91 percent of cyber-attacks start with email.

The conference, dubbed ‘Anatomy of an email borne attack’, had Steve Herridge, Sales Director MEA, Mimecast,  note that 9/10 attacks start with email and 70 percent of the attacks lead to secondary targets.

“Companies are being attacked by malicious cyber criminals with more frequency and sophistication than ever before. These attacks can cause huge financial losses and could cost you your reputation and your business,”

Steve Herridge

Sales Direcror MEA, Mimecast.

“Companies are being attacked by malicious cyber criminals with more frequency and sophistication than ever before. These attacks can cause huge financial losses and could cost you your reputation and your business,” added Herridge.

The event included industry speakers such as Dr Bright Gameli, Co-Founder, Africahackon who confirmed that indeed emails are the start points of most attacks saying that: “Emails are the easiest way to get hacked because the hacker doesn’t have to be there physically,”

In his social engineering demo, Dr Gameli used run of the mill software and Google (yes the search engine) to get email addresses from different companies and intern send out phishing emails to the organisations.  Dr Gameli’s Demo illustrated just how easy it is for a dedicated hacker to get into a system with limited resources.

Mimecast outlook on the threat of emails

In working with more than 26,000 customers, Mimecast has seen first-hand that not all email security systems perform equally well.  In order to prove this, Mimecast has launched the Email Security Risk Assessment (ESRA).

The ESRA testing to date has covered 62,323 email users over a cumulative 428 days of inbound email received into the organizations participating in the testing. In this time period more than 45 million emails were inspected by Mimecast. It is critical to understand that these emails were all passed by the incumbent email security system or cloud security service in use by the particular organization.

The Mimecast security inspections occurred passively after the incumbent email security system executed all of its security filters. Overall the Mimecast security service determined that nearly 11 million of the more than 45 million emails, or 24.2%, were in fact “bad” or “likely bad.”