Intermedia, a leading cloud business applications provider, today announced that six new anti-phishing features have been integrated within its Intermedia Email Protection solution to address the escalating and widespread threat of phishing attacks.

Phishing emails attempt to coerce a user into making a financial transaction, disclosing login credentials or visiting a malware-laden website. Total phishing attacks surpassed 1.2 million in 2016 – a year-over-year increase of 65 percent. While 86 percent of office workers feel confident in their ability to detect phishing emails, the reality is that roughly one in five have fallen victim. With Ransomware having grown into a $1 billion business, and the prevalence of sophisticated worldwide attacks such as WannaCry, businesses must prepare for things to get worse, not better.

Enterprise-grade anti-phishing protection, designed for SMBs
Contrary to popular belief, SMBs are the victims of the majority (60 percent) of targeted cyberattacks and are 5x more likely than larger organizations to fall victim to ransomware. Because SMBs are frequently limited by technical and/or financial resources to protect their data effectively, their vulnerability makes them a prime target. Intermedia Email Protection is specifically designed to help SMBs counter the latest phishing, spear-phishing, and spoofing techniques.

“While many email security providers charge extra for these types of advanced anti-phishing features, we believe these measures should not be restricted to enterprise-sized companies,” said Alex Smith, Director of Security Products at Intermedia. “Available at no additional cost to our Exchange Email users, Intermedia Email Protection’s sophisticated cybersecurity features help SMBs defend against current and future threats. Paired with Intermedia’s 24/7 J.D. Power-certified support, SMBs get the enterprise-grade protection they need to avoid disruption to their business.”

New Intermedia Email Protection features include:

  • Similar domain check: Spear-phishing campaign authors will typically register an email domain that looks ‘similar’ to a company’s email domain (e.g., iintermedia.net with two i’s instead of intermedia.net). Intermedia’s domain check feature uses a similarity algorithm to confirm that the sending domain is, in fact, someone from within the organization.
  • User impersonation check: Spear-phishing attacks target specific employees within an organization, by impersonating someone they know – most typically the CEO or other high-profile individuals. Since many email clients prominently show the sender’s display name (instead of their actual email address), attackers will commonly change the display name in an attempt to trick the recipient. Intermedia’s impersonation check feature helps identify and eliminate this threat.
  • Suspicious content check: This feature performs an email content inspection to pinpoint vocabulary and language that might indicate a spear-phishing attack. The message can then be blocked or a subject tag (such as “[POSSIBLE PHISHING ATTEMPT]”) can be added, alerting the recipient to take greater caution when reading and acting upon the message.
  • Tag messages from external senders: This is a straightforward way for users to know if a message originated from outside of the organization. The word “[EXTERNAL]” can be added to all messages sent from someone outside of your company, so emails that appear to be from a colleague but contain this subject tag should be treated as suspicious. This feature is most effective when coupled with security training for your employees on how to react to these kinds of messages.
  • Reply-to check: A phishing email will often contain an innocuous message like, “Hi John, are you there?” to elicit a spontaneous reply. This feature checks the “reply to” address of a message to alert readers if they are sending a response to a different address from where the email originated.
  • Domain impersonation check: To help stop attackers from spoofing a company’s email domain, this feature determines if the sending domain of an external message is an exact match to a company email domain. These messages should simply be dropped unless they originated from specific, predefined sources.

Intermedia Email Protection also comes with Intermedia LinkSafe™ for sophisticated point-of-click protection against malicious URLs that would take readers to known phishing sites. While the industry has traditionally only made this type of malicious link protection available at higher price points, Intermedia includes sophisticated email security techniques in its offering to SMBs and the partners that serve them.

Email and security integration create new opportunities for partners
“Email fraud has evolved, and it is no longer enough to have email protection against just malware and viruses contained within attachments. Phishing and ransomware have become huge threats to businesses of all sizes. The channel community has a real opportunity to help companies defend themselves while also differentiating their own offerings. These Intermedia Email Protection features will be valuable to every mailbox a partner sells and can be sold under the partner’s own brand,” concluded Smith.

About Intermedia Email Protection
Intermedia Email Protection blocks more than 10 million email-based threats on a peak day. While many security and mailbox solutions are decoupled, Intermedia Email Protection bridges these capabilities. The tightly integrated platform provides a one-point email security solution with multi-engine protection, over and above what single engine services can offer. As a result, users can rely on a detection rate of more than 99 percent and extremely low false positives to filter out spam, phishing, and known and emerging threats. Get complete mailbox integration with outstanding reliability and J.D. Power-certified 24/7 support.

Intermedia Email Protection is made available as an integrated add-on for Exchange users at no additional cost. Learn more about Intermedia’s comprehensive suite of email, security and backup solutions at https://www.intermedia.net/products/office-in-the-cloud.