Let’s face it: your inbox is a warzone. Email security is a constant battle between evolving threats and the defenses designed to stop them. Every day, attackers bombard user inboxes with increasingly sophisticated phishing attempts, malware, and social engineering attacks.
So, how do we win the battle? It’s not as simple as slapping on a piece of software; it’s about implementing a multi-layered approach that balances AI-driven automation and human expertise. This way, we ensure that security policies remain dynamic and adaptive to emerging threats. But what does this multi-layered approach entail? Keep reading to find out.
What is Email Security?
Email security encompasses the prediction, prevention, detection, and response solutions used to provide attack protection and access protection. It spans gateways, email systems, user behavior, and content security, along with the various supporting processes, services, and adjacent security architecture. Ultimately, effective email security requires not only the selection of the correct products with the required capabilities and configurations but also the right operational procedures in place.
Prediction and Prevention
Prediction and prevention are the first stages of any effective email security strategy. As the adage goes, prevention is better than a cure. Organizations should monitor phishing infrastructure, track newly registered domains, and analyze dark web discussions to anticipate attack patterns before they materialize. AI’s ability to process large datasets, identify anomalies, and flag potential threats is particularly useful here.
However, AI can’t do everything. Human analysts are essential for contextual interpretation – that is, distinguishing between legitimate domain registration and an adversary preparing an attack or recognizing social engineering tactics that fall outside existing detection models.
Together, AI-powered analysis with human-curated intelligence allows organizations to refine detection and adjust security policies in real-time, thus improving their ability to preemptively block threats.
How Fortra Can Help
Fortra Threat Brain, which powers our email security solutions, takes this approach to prediction and prevention. Human analysts - Fortra’s experts, security partners, and global law enforcement agencies - provide critical context and nuanced understanding.
We complement this expertise with AI-based automation and machine learning, which process vast datasets from Fortra's solutions, the dark web, social media, and partner/law enforcement data. This combination provides rapid, automated threat detection and deep, expert-driven analysis, creating a robust and adaptive defense.
Detection and Response
Detection and response are another opportunity for human expertise and automation to work in concert. AI-powered anomaly detection, secure email gateways, and machine learning-based filters provide the first line of defense, efficiently blocking known threats and suspicious patterns.
Yet, attackers exploit AI’s weaknesses by crafting context-aware phishing emails, leveraging generative models to mimic natural human conversation, and bypassing rigid detection thresholds.
Here, human analysts step in - investigating flagged emails, identifying false positives, and analyzing sophisticated attacks that evade automation. Their judgment and experience enable them to detect the intent behind an email, making nuanced determinations that technology alone cannot. This feedback loop between human insight and AI-driven security continuously refines detection models and strengthens overall protection.
How Fortra Can Help
Fortra’s Secure Email Gateway solutions, combined with our Cloud Email Protection platform, utilize AI-powered anomaly detection and machine learning-powered filters. However, we also offer Suspicious Email Analysis, which involves a team of security analysts examining emails flagged as suspicious by employees to help identify more sophisticated, context-aware phishing emails that can bypass AI-powered tools.
The Bottom Line
A successful email security strategy is not built on AI or human expertise alone; it’s a balance of both. Organizations that combine automated efficiency with expert-driven adaptability can better predict, prevent, detect, and respond to evolving threats.
By continuously refining security policies, leveraging intelligence from both technology and human analysis, and adapting to emerging attack trends, organizations can create an email security framework that is resilient, proactive, and capable of countering even the most sophisticated cyber threats.
Fortra offers a three-pronged approach to email security:
Domain Protection: A robust DMARC authentication and monitoring solution automates the process of DMARC email authentication and enforcement to stop phishing and protect customers from cyberattacks. This helps preserve brand identity and improve digital engagement, even post-deployment.
Cloud Email Security: Fortra's Cloud Email Protection combines data science, global inbox threat intelligence, and automated remediation into a single cloud-native platform to ward off threats that would bypass traditional defenses.
Secure Gateways: Secure Gateways are email security solutions that monitor emails coming into and out of an organization before they reach an inbox to protect against malicious content, including spam, viruses, phishing, and malware.
Want to find out more about how Fortra’s email security solutions, driven by AI tools and human experts, can help secure your organization from email threats? Contact us today.
