Fighting phishing and securing data with email authentication

Business email compromise scams (also known as ‘CEO fraud’) have cost companies 3. 1bn in the past two years alone, according to the FBI. Indeed, spear-phishing is one of the biggest challenges facing enterprises today, with 84% of businesses having already suffered from an attack. Why is email fraud so effective? Too often, organisations use people, their weakest link, as their first line of defence. This presents a huge opportunity for cyber-criminals. The cost of phishing – in revenue, in data lost, in remediation and regulatory costs – is far too great to leave the email channel undefended. Estelle Derouet of Return Path explores the primary means of executing one of the most dangerous spear-phishing attacks today. And she offers some best practices for combating email fraud at the organisational level.