Getting emails which contain all sorts of malware, viruses and other nasty content is bad enough as it is. It significantly hinders productivity, can infect many parts of the organisation and will, in most cases, be a very costly exercise to recover from, both financially and from a reputational aspect.
Now imagine that this has a flow-on effect on your customers, where malware is propagating itself via email to your customers by harvesting contact details from various parts of your infrastructure. Whether this is a contact list in your Outlook, a spreadsheet that got exported from your CRM solution or any other source this software can get its hands on.
Virus propagation
It is a common practise for virus or other malware writers to be as effective as possible to spread as wide and quickly as possible before any countermeasures can be put in place. When a virus has made its way into the organisation, there are many pathways to do that. The easiest is to attach itself to software that is intended for communication, i.e. email, and use that mechanism for propagation. As an example, see the “ILoveYou” virus page here on Wikipedia.
When these contact lists contain sets of external companies or people, it will be indiscriminate and therefore will also make its way to them. How does that look when you get contacted by your customer and told you’ve been sending them viruses or other malware? I’m pretty sure that your company will suffer some significant reputational damage, even when the external party was able to intercept it.
Outbound protection
By using an outbound relay system, such as the one provided by Proofpoint as part of the QUADSEC package, you are not only protecting your company from malware entering your environment but also preventing outbound email from reaching its target. The Proofpoint solution allows the same protection for outbound email as it does for inbound. This means that if an email that originates from one of your employees contains some sort of malware, it will be quarantined and both the sender and the administrator get notified.
This has also significant benefits for security research purposes as you will get timely notifications, are able to trigger countermeasures more quickly and can diagnose the cause much faster.
Most importantly, preventing a potential reputational disaster is very high on any company’s wish list.
Contact us for more information.
Kind regards
Erwin
