A significant security threat to any organization is the continual presence of spam in our inboxes. It’s one easy way for an attacker to literally plant seemingly harmless information into the minds of personnel, and then prey on their natural human tendencies. In a corporate inbox, spam can pose a serious security threat.

Other than using shady social engineering tactics that convey urgency, fear, curiosity, or authority to manipulate victims, threat actors are also honing their skills, using tactics such as obfuscation, fileless malware and macros, and quid pro quo (QPQ) attacks which are methods not typically seen in the traditional phishing email but accomplish the same goal. As modern spammers are increasingly more capable of bypassing traditional email filters, the need to combat this threat is becoming steadily more relevant.

SC Media provides six ways to fend off spam in corporate networks:

1. AI-based filtering. Using advanced machine learning technology, these modern spam filters are capable of adapting to emerging spamming mechanisms and not only relying on predefined rules.  
2. Sender authentication protocols. Protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC help to authenticate email senders and minimizes the likelihood of spoofed or forged emails getting through.
3. Content and behavioral analyses. This type of analysis will detect suspicious patterns in email content, going beyond traditional keyword-based filtering. It examines user interactions for anomalies that will signal spam or phishing attempts.
4. Sandboxing. The sandbox method will isolate the user’s environment allowing teams to safely open and execute attachments or links within the sandbox without risk of infecting the user’s main system in the event of a malicious link or email.
5. Integration with threat intel feeds. Using real-time data from intelligence feeds, teams can update filters and pinpoint new spam tactics before they impact the network.
6. Discover and hide exposed email addresses. Exposed email addresses on the internet are prone to becoming targets. Certain external attack surface management tools are able to discover exposed email addresses allowing teams to hide them from being publicly accessible.

Implementing the above security measures highly decreases the chances of spam getting through and impacting personnel. As there will never be a single fool-proof security solution to spam filtering, defending against this threat must consist of continuously updated advanced email filtering, security protocols, modern data security tools, and user education. For more details on the modern spam landscape, see SC Media.