Mimecast Report: Incumbent Email Security Solutions Missing Millions of Email Threats

Mimecast Limited (NASDAQ:MIME), a leading email and data security company, today announced the launch of the Mimecast Email Security Risk Assessment (ESRA), an analysis report measuring the effectiveness of email security systems; this effort highlights the need to push the entire industry to work toward a higher standard of email security. The report showed that millions of email attacks ranging from opportunistic spam to highly-targeted impersonation attacks are getting through incumbent email security systems costing organizations a lot of time and money to clean up.
As quoted in the press release:

Many organizations think their current email security systems are up to the task of protecting them. However, if an organization hasn’t reviewed its approach to email security within the last 18 months, it is likely vulnerable to attack. The Mimecast ESRA testing to date has covered 23,744 email users over a cumulative 153 days of inbound email received into the organizations participating in the testing. This first report compiled the results of all assessments performed, in which more than 26 million emails were inspected by the Mimecast service. These emails had all passed through the incumbent email security vendor or cloud email service in use by each organization. However, Mimecast found millions of missed email threats had gotten through these incumbent security systems. Mimecast uncovered almost 3.5 million pieces of spam, 6,681 dangerous file types, 1,207 known and 421 unknown malware attachments and 1,697 impersonation attacks.
To complement this hands-on testing, Mimecast conducted research with Vanson Bourne on the state of organizations’ cybersecurity, their expectations and needs and what attacks they’ve seen increase. Findings were based on responses received from 800 IT decision makers and C-level executives globally. Not surprisingly, and consistent with the results of the Mimecast ESRA report, advanced attacks were reported to be on the rise. For example, forty-five percent of respondents reported an increase in malicious macros within attachments. Not only that, but 64 percent of organizations believe they will suffer a negative business impact from cybercriminals in 2017, while 56 percent think malicious emails or URLs will be the likely attack vector.

Click here for the full text release.