According to an FBI report, in 2022, global losses from business email compromise (BEC) and email account compromise (EAC) attacks attained $43 billion, hitting a historic anti-record. Multiple cybersecurity vendors, including Microsoft and Trend Micro, reported a rapid growth of sophisticated phishing attacks earlier this year, causing unprecedented financial losses to organizations of all sizes.
Finally, many security experts are concerned that with the public accessibility of generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, various types of attacks targeting email credentials – spanning from simple social engineering campaigns to sophisticated domain-squatting combined with spear-phishing chained attacks exploiting previously stolen personal data – will skyrocket both in quantity and quality despite the mounting spending on corporate cybersecurity.
ImmuniWeb Community Edition: Introducing free email security test
To help companies and organizations to quickly assess their exposure to email-related security, privacy and compliance risks, ImmuniWeb has recently enhanced its Community Edition with a free email security test available online.
Running over 200,000 security daily scans, ImmuniWeb Community Edition helps SMEs, universities and small municipal governments, non-profit organizations, as well as individual software developers to detect a broad spectrum of cybersecurity and compliance issues at no cost, eventually maintaining a foundational cyber resilience and information security.
Email security test: Exposed credentials
Leveraging other free online tests by ImmuniWeb Community Edition, you will see whether any logins and passwords – belonging to your domains – have been compromised in direct or third-party data breaches, which are discoverable on the Dark Web marketplaces or resources of ransomware groups offering stolen data for free or in exchange for a payment in an open auction.
Given that many users still neglect password policies and try to reuse their password wherever possible, keeping an eye on previously compromised credentials may prevent compromise of your corporate emails by simple but efficient smart password bruteforcing techniques that leverage combination of previous passwords used by the victims on various resources.
Email security test: Ongoing phishing and domain squatting campaigns
The free email security test will show currently active phishing campaigns aimed, among other things, at misappropriating credentials of your corporate email accounts. Phishing campaigns may greatly vary by sophistication and thus underlying tactics. Beginner cybercriminals may run primitive and poorly-written emails with links to malicious websites that will unlikely impress any educated users.
However, experienced cyber mercenaries or state-backed hacking groups may go far beyond. For instance, when going after your C-level executives, they may send an email from your already-compromised corporate email with a link to a breached subdomain of your official website, which will contain an impeccable login form or even an exploit pack with several exploits for 0day vulnerabilities.
Frequently, such attacks or preparation to them may be timely spotted and investigated, thereby minimizing the risk of falling victim to skilled cyber mercenaries.
Email security test: SPF, DMARC, DKIM and other DNS records
While DNS hardening may seem somewhat banal and presumed-by-default in 2023, many organizations still disregard these simple security best practices.
The free email security test will shed light on possible DNS weaknesses in your infrastructure accompanied with brief guidelines on how to fix them, reducing the success rate of several widespread email attack vectors.
Email security test: Server security and SSL/TLS encryption
Surprisingly, some organizations still fail to implement robust SSL/TLS encryption for their corporate emails, considering that encryption is primarily relevant for web applications. According to our internal statistics, every single day, our free email security test spots at least one email server that still runs TLS 1.0 or even SSLv3 vulnerable to Heartbleed.
Some email servers have no encryption at all, leaving their users exposed to a guaranteed credential theft whenever they use insecure public network to verify their emails. Other servers permit open relay, being a gift for spammers. All these and other misconfigurations will be thoroughly verified by the free email security test in a non-intrusive manner, providing concise guidelines on how to fix them.
Email security test: Black lists and spam list monitoring
Occasionally, an imprudent mass-mailing test by your marketing team may land your email server’s IP or domain name in the publicly accessible lists of compromised email servers or servers known for sending spam.
In additional to the reputational damage and possible legal consequences if the presence in a spam list is justified, such occurrences may prevent your corporate users from sending and receiving important business emails, eventually hindering professional communications and losing business opportunities.
The free email security test will quickly tell you whether your email servers are currently blacklisted, so you can further investigate the root cause of the incident and take remedial measures.
Try the free email security test now to detect all the above-mentioned and other security, privacy and compliance implications that may be critical for your business continuity and data protection.