Email security remains a critical challenge for organizations. With various vulnerabilities and the evolving nature of attacks, protecting email systems has become increasingly complex. Let’s understand why email security poses such difficulties and highlight the role artificial intelligence (AI) plays in addressing some of these challenges.

Email is the ultimate vector for multi-stage attacks

Email serves as a primary attack vector for threat actors seeking to infiltrate organizations. By compromising an individual’s inbox, malicious attackers can circumvent cybersecurity defenses, escalate privileges, move laterally within the network, exfiltrate sensitive information and potentially gain control over critical systems.

Email is insecure by design

Email is a technology that is half a century old. Despite being intended for widespread adoption, it was not originally built with security as a fundamental design principle.

Email provides access to people deep within the organization

People will usually not pick up phone calls from unidentified parties. However, with companies using standard formats for email addresses, someone’s name is all a hacker needs to guess their ID and send malicious messages.

Email enables access to applications within an organization

Many organizations have single sign-on (SSO) enabled. If an attacker can compromise someone’s email credentials, they can potentially access desktop applications like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

Email cannot be turned off

Email is the primary method of communication for internal and external audiences. So many business processes (for example, authentication and access to applications) are dependent on email that it simply cannot be turned off.

Traditional Detection Methods Aren’t Effective

Traditional email security is designed to detect threats using known indicators of compromise, such as malicious IP addresses and URLs, untrusted domains and weaponized documents. In contrast, modern attacks are highly targeted. They originate from trusted domains and do not contain weaponized links or malicious attachments. Instead, threat actors leverage social engineering to persuade a victim to perform a certain action (clicking, downloading, visiting a bogus site), which then allows the URL or attachment to become weaponized.

Thanks to generative AI’s ability to draft well-formed grammatical sentences and impersonate real humans, phishing has become much more difficult to detect. Earlier forms of phishing emails contained errors, spelling mistakes and unusual mannerisms, making them easier to identify. Phishing emails today are coherent, conversational and indistinguishable from legitimate email messages.

Security Can Leverage AI, but the Technology is Far From Perfect

Given that the threat landscape has dramatically altered in recent years, established email security vendors have already begun augmenting their solutions with AI and machine learning capabilities. They include features like profiling the behavior of each sender and recipient, detecting anomalous patterns, checking if the content has been written by generative AI tools, flagging content for investigation by analyzing a set of signals such as tone, intent, urgency etc. Studies reveal that 92% of email security vendors already claim to have updated their technology to include AI-enabled protections, while 66.4% are reportedly using an AI solution that is supposed to protect them against unknown threats.

That being said, recent studies confirm that current generation AI-based detection models are not particularly effective for three major reasons. One is the sheer volume of unwanted graymail that needs to be analyzed and investigated. The second is that phishing emails do not meet the character-limit criteria (longer text samples are needed for AI to detect phishing content with greater accuracy). Finally, attackers increasingly employ obfuscation techniques to evade AI detection models.

Technology, Process and People Still Matter

AI is certainly very powerful and is no doubt faster at detecting anomalies and behavioral patterns at scale. However, organizations still need insight from experienced cybersecurity teams to interpret patterns, make nuanced judgments and fine-tune AI detection models.

Organizations will always need well-trained, security-conscious employees that proactively identify and report email threats. That’s because human instinct and a culture that arises to support security as a priority combine to serve as a powerful threat detection mechanism.

In case of a security incident, how do you respond? How do people deal with malicious emails? Where do they report them? Building clarity and simplicity into an organization’s security policies and procedures streamlines and empowers employees to make secure choices.

By combining AI-driven analysis, human insight, human instinct and simplified procedures, organizations can ensure a robust defense and faster response to advanced email-borne threats.