According to the 2016 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), email continues to be the primary attack vector for cybercriminals. Complex email threats seek to exploit the weakest link in the chain―humans. Malware in email leverages social engineering to convince its recipient to open an attachment or click on a link. Threats like Trojan Dridex use email spam campaigns masquerading as financial emails, such as invoices, receipts or orders. As these email threats evolve, organizations need an email security solution that is fine-tuned to detect these advanced threats.
Fortunately, Symantec Email Security.cloud helps protect your enterprise from email-borne viruses, malware, spam, phishing, targeted attacks, and bulk email, without the complexities of on-premise technology.
Putting Symantec Email Security.cloud to the Test
But how does Email Security.cloud hold up against the competition when it comes to threat detection?
Symantec recently ran an internal test to measure the threat detection capabilities of Email Security.cloud against other industry solutions. The Effective Score is calculated as a combination of detection score and false positive score.
The results (see Figure 1) show that Symantec remains the leader in email threat detection effectiveness and accuracy. Not only did Email Security.cloud have the highest effectiveness (99.62% detected), it was one of the most accurate email security products (0.04% false positive rate). In addition, while some competitors have become less effective over time, Symantec has maintained a high level of effectiveness.
How Symantec Email Security.cloud Protects Your Organization’s Emails
Symantec Email Security.cloud leverages deep visibility into global threats, advanced heuristic analysis of email messages, and real-time following of links to detect and block email-borne threats such as targeted attacks, spear phishing, and sophisticated malware.
Protection Through Intelligence
Symantec Email Security.cloud is backed by the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, the world’s largest civilian threat intelligence network that provides global visibility into the threat landscape. With over 175 million endpoints and 57 million attack sensors in 157 countries, the Symantec Global Intelligence Network collects and analyzes massive amounts of security telemetry to help deliver better security outcomes.
Skeptic Heuristics
Skeptic is the proprietary scanning technology of Email Security.cloud that examines multiple attributes of an email to look for anomalies. It learns from what it sees and uses heuristics to consider how malicious content could be applied in alternative ways to implement protection immediately. This technology is adept at blocking crafted emails and attachments since it looks at all email characteristics such as delivery behavior, message attributes, and social engineering tricks. Skeptic analyzes more than 9 billion email messages and 1.8 billion web requests collected daily by Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network.
Real-Time Link Following
This technology tracks a link to its final destination and protects an enterprise from receiving emails that contain links to malicious content. Unlike other solutions that rely on reactive blacklists, we take a proactive stance with our email protection and provide deep evaluation of any link with heuristic analysis of files found. Overall, real-time link following protects against new and malicious URLs created for phishing or spear phishing attempts by stopping these links before they get to your inbox. For example, this capability blocked 1.15 billion email messages last year.
Driving Innovation for Customers and the Industry
Overall, these capabilities and the internal testing results prove that Symantec customers are teaming up with a leader dedicated to innovation in email security. Testing demonstrates we’re constantly pushing ourselves―as well as other security organizations―to improve, innovate, and advance our industry.
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