Warning Users Helps Them Stay Alert to Email Dangers
Over the last several years we have witnessed an explosion of vendors and services that focus on protecting end-users against the many dangers coming in through emails. Vigilance Technologies partners with many of these vendors to bring our clients the best protection available. However, there are steps that any organization can take right now to help end-users stay alert to the dangers of malicious payloads contained within the emails they receive.
The use of simple warning messages that prepend email content is a simple to setup within services like Microsoft 365 and Gmail, for example. The banner below is one such example of having this warning appear on emails that originate outside of your organization:
[EXTERNAL EMAIL] This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
While a banner on its own cannot be considered properly securing your end-users against email-borne threat vectors, they do at least keep the end-user aware that there are links or payloads within the received email that they should avoid activating. Since the end-user is always the weakest link in any defense you deploy, you must concentrate much of your efforts in educating, training, and testing your staff on these dangers.
Organizations using Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online can easily configure this banner in the Exchange Online Admin Console, under Mail Flow. It takes 10 minutes to setup the email banner configurations. Once saved, your end-users will be warned on every email they receive that originates from outside of the organization. Awareness is a major part of the battle against cyber criminals. The more that you train and test your users, the better your success in reducing the amount of potential breaches that malicious emails could inflict.
