Why Secure Email Gateways are not enough to protect you from cyberattacks

Secure Email Gateways (SEGs), or Email Security Gateways, are made to filter out malicious email traffic and only deliver non-threatening emails. Are they always effective and enough to protect you from cyberattacks? Not completely. 

Read more about Secure Email Gateways, why they are not always trustworthy, and how organizations can protect themselves better from email-based cyberattacks.

What is a Secure Email Gateway?

Secure Email Gateways or shortly SEGs are an email security solution that awaits on an email's path from the public internet to the corporate email server. It inspects email traffic for malicious content before it reaches the corporate systems.

Organizations should protect themselves from email cyberattacks

Many organizations apply a Secure Email Gateway as part of their email security system. Before an email enters or exits their employees' inboxes, it first needs to pass through a Secure Email Gateway, which checks whether the incoming emails show any signs of a malicious message or content. If it detects red flags, like typical signs of email phishing, it won't deliver the email. It can also scan outgoing emails for sensitive or confidential information.

How does a Secure Email Gateway work?

Secure Email Gateways detect emails with unwanted content like spam, phishing links, or malware. Once a Secure Email Gateway detects a potential email threat, it blocks the email from reaching the recipient. This slims down the odds of a company falling victim to an email cyberattack. Due to the fact that the malicious email is not even delivered, the recipient cannot interact with it and potentially click on a malicious link or download a malicious attachment.

Common features of Secure Email Gateways

Filtering spam

A Secure Email Gateway focuses mainly on clearing out spam emails. It looks for common patterns found in spam messages and blocks them. Depending on the specific vendor and solution, it can also include a feature for employees to mark an email as spam.

Protecting from malicious content

Secure Email Gateways can find some elements of a phishing email such as malicious links or attachments. Despite this, sophisticated phishing attacks can pass SEGs, delivering the email.

Preventing data loss

Outgoing emails are scanned with a Secure Email Gateway too. It looks for sensitive information in emails that are getting sent to unauthorized recipients.

What are the dangers of using Secure Email Gateways?

Even though Secure Email Gateways are a widely used email security defense tool, they haven’t kept up with all the different ways that email attacks can happen. SEGs look at the basic and traditional signs of suspicious emails. This means that they don’t catch advanced dangerous attacks, like social engineering attacks that are often used these days.

While an SEG does a great job of filtering spam and large-scale email attacks, it’s not equipped to handle highly-targeted phishing and social engineering attacks. 

So what can you do to protect your organization from advanced attacks?

Email Security Gateway protection one step further

Organizations can protect themselves from basic email cyberattacks by utilizing a Secure Email Gateway. On top of an SEG, they can add an extra layer of security by using an email encryption tool, like our SSH Secure Mail.

Our highly secure and easy-to-use email encryption solution provides full-on email security with these features:

Access verification

You can verify senders and recipients alike with various authentication methods (including MFA, PIN, and SSO) and ensure full security with detailed monitoring features, like audit trails and reporting.

Robust security

Deltagon Secure Mail protects your email communications with robust encryption, all the way from sender to recipient. It supports various email security protocols (DMARC, DKIM, SPF) as well as S/MIME-based encryption.

Full control over your data

You are in control of your data with flexible deployment in the cloud or on-premises. Secure Mail also offers multiple configuration options (APIs, web interfaces).

Compliance with data security regulations

You can classify confidential data into various categories (like sensitive, highly confidential, secret, etc.) and adjust security levels according to your company policies. Like that, you stay compliant with data privacy laws and regulations (e.g. GDPR) thanks to government-grade security.

Automatic scanning of email traffic

Similarly to Secure Email Gateways, Secure Mail automatically scans and analyzes your email traffic and recognizes confidential information. Based on your policies, you can automatically encrypt such emails or prevent them from being sent.

User-friendly experience

Secure Mail interoperates with any email system without changes to the user experience. No extensive training for users and no end-user accounts are needed. A browser-based interface makes it easy for third parties to start encrypted communication with your business.

 

Learn more about SSH Secure Mail >>> 

Start your journey toward full-on, advanced email security and reach out to us to see Secure Mail in action >>>