New Research Finds that IT and Security Teams Would Need to Devote 305 Hours Each Week to Investigate and Mitigate All of These Email Threats; New ROI Calculator Helps Assess Risk Level and Provides Tips to Manage Threats
BELMONT, Mass.–July 12, 2017 –GreatHorn, the cybersecurity solution for cloud communication platforms, today announced the results of their original research, The Cloud Email Security Challenge: Closing the Cybersecurity Skills Gap Through Automation. The company analyzed more than 3.5 terabytes of data – over 373 million corporate emails – from its proprietary data cloud to gain insights into the sheer volume of email threats facing enterprises and the role of automated tools in helping them keep up with that challenge. GreatHorn found that the average enterprise receives 3,680 messages containing threat characteristics that require review, investigation and (if applicable) remediation per week. Without automated tools, the company estimates that task would take a security team roughly 305 hours to complete.
GreatHorn analyzed anonymized information from its data cloud and found that 0.016% of all corporate emails contained threat characteristics. Combine this statistic alongside a few more facts: the average Fortune 500 company has 50,000 employees, each receiving roughly 460 emails per week which equates to more than 23 million communications generated. GreatHorn used this data to create a risk profile and identify the types of attacks cyber criminals utilize as well as the volume. Given this environment, GreatHorn found that Fortune 500 companies can expect to experience 1,380 direct spoof attacks, 460 display name spoofs, 560 emails with “W2” or “Wire Transfer” included, 230 domain lookalikes and 1,150 authentication risks on a weekly basis.
While all of these emails aren’t necessarily malicious, they do have traits that require an IT analyst’s attention for approximately five minutes; furthermore, if an email is malicious, the amount of time required to investigate and remediate the threat could be much higher. This many email threats would take roughly 305 hours to properly review and remediate per week; a task made even more difficult by the fact that enterprise IT and information teams almost always find themselves pushing against resource limitations. Frost & Sullivan’s Global Information Security Workforce Study shows that this environment will persist as the analyst firm predicts the cybersecurity workforce gap will reach 1.8 million by 2022.
“Our research shows that it is impossible for security teams to detect, analyze and respond to every suspicious email their organization receives,” said GreatHorn CEO Kevin O’Brien. “Without the ability to hire qualified cybersecurity expertise, automation must become a bigger part of the equation to help enterprises stay ahead of cybercriminals. Automation reduces the workload on IT and security teams by programmatically identifying and addressing threats based on preset policies.”
GreatHorn provides enterprises with comprehensive, cloud-native protection against message-based threats, driven by machine learning and automated response capabilities. Businesses are increasingly adopting cloud-based communication platforms such as Office 365, Google G Suite and Slack because of their enhanced collaboration capabilities. However, hackers view these platforms’ features as a major opportunity and are utilizing sophisticated low-volume, highly targeted attacks to fool employees into providing them with access to critical data. GreatHorn Inbound Email Security platform uniquely provides the ability to identify and shut down these attacks before damage occurs, without the risk of a traditional network routing solution or the limitations of perimeter blocking.
In addition, GreatHorn today unveiled its Email Security Automation ROI Calculator, an easy-to-use tool that helps companies assess their risk level while providing recommendations on reducing costs and managing resources associated with mitigating email threats. Based on the specific size of a company, size of IT team and average security staff salary information, GreatHorn will provide businesses with the number of email threats facing similar organizations, the time necessary to mitigate the threats, the number of employees to properly handle these efforts and the estimated annual cost of manual cybersecurity protection versus an automated tool.
About GreatHorn
GreatHorn is the cybersecurity solution for cloud communication platforms. The company’s flagship product is the only solution that can automatically detect and remediate targeted social engineering attacks in today’s leading communication systems including Google Apps, Office 365 and Slack. With its proprietary dataset built from hundreds of millions of uniquely analyzed threats, GreatHorn combines the intelligence, fidelity, and precision necessary to prevent attacks from becoming breaches. For more information on the company, visit www.GreatHorn.com or you can follow GreatHorn on LinkedIn or Twitter.
