“War is politics by other means,” wrote the famous military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, back in the early 19th century, which was a time when wars were fairly limited, low tech, and almost gentlemanly affairs. Tell a Ukrainian today that Russia’s invasion of their country is simply another form of politics, and I don’t want to be around to see their response.
Just as warfare has evolved to become an almost unthinkably complex system where every civilian is on the frontline, so has the field of e-security. “Cyberwar” was once an abstract sci-fi concept in the realm of comic books, and “cyberattacks” were once mostly a nuisance – like when your geeky nephew loaded a virus onto your computer (via floppy disk) that flashed an ASCII text version of a skull and crossbones.
Now cyberattacks are routinely government-crippling fiascos that are perpetrated by governments themselves as well as well-funded organized crime networks. The combined cost of these attacks now runs annually in the tens of billions of dollars. Just as the threat has evolved, so has the response. Therefore, we predict that 2023 will be less about passive prevention and more about active threat hunting.
Going back the warfare analogy, consider the Iron Dome, Israel’s air defense system developed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells targeting civilians. The Iron Dome uses radars to track incoming threats and determine their trajectory. It then fires interceptor missiles to destroy the threats in mid-air before it strikes. This system has an impressively high success rate of around 85%, so long as your house is not in the vicinity of the other 15% of missiles that get through.
Last year, we introduced the concept of preemption with regards to RMail, and we drew a distinction with the term prevention to describe the nature of our Eavesdropping™ alerts technology. To reuse the war analogy, the difference is that a preventive war is launched to destroy the potential threat of the targeted party, when an attack by that party is not imminent or known to be planned. A preemptive war is launched in anticipation of immediate aggression by another party. Thus, RMail can’t prevent attacks (because there’s no way to realistically destroy all cybercriminals), but it can preempt the inevitable attack.
Learn What is an Eavesdropping Attack?
These inevitable social engineering attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and frequent. This new breed of attacks calls for a shift in the approach to preempt them. That is why we’ve recently introduced our Active Threat Hunting approach, which can be thought of as RMail’s Iron Dome — a SMART technology that actively analyzes the life of email as it circulates around and identifies when a sensitive email is being acted on by a cybercriminal as a precursor for their onslaught.
Note that RMail’s Email Eavesdropping™ alerts not only protect your organization from falling prey to social engineering attacks including wire fraud and simply mistakenly paying invoices to the wrong (criminal) person; but they also spot security breaches beyond your email borders, at the recipient, which is relevant to those scenarios where the impostor cuts you out of the communication, resulting in your recipient miswiring funds meant for you, sent to a cybercriminal. Email Eavesdropping™ alerts work seamlessly within any existing email security or email system.
Wow. All this talk of warfare, Iron Domes, missiles, and cyberfraud (in addition to the awful weather we’ve been having in California) has gotten me in a bleak mood. Let’s wrap this up with some uplifting factoids:
As always, feel free to contact us to discuss how RMail and its Email Eavesdropping™ alerts will give you peace-of-mind (you’ll sleep like a sea otter!) in this rather unsettled world.
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