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Email security: negating false positives
Email security: negating false positives
By Melissa Chua | Sep 7, 2011
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PrintAn important email that fails to reach the intended recipient could cost a company millions in lost business.
According to research commissioned by email authentication vendor TrustSphere and conducted by Osterman Research, false positives or genuine emails marked as spam, cost the typical organization $230 per email and could lead to a loss of sales and revenue, angry clients and lost productivity.
Users accessing their email via mobile channels face additional inconveniences when genuine emails get blocked. While genuine emails may be retrieved upon return to the office, rarely do they get released from quarantine when accessed from a mobile device.
Spam filtering solutions, designed to help companies fight cluttered inboxes, could inadvertently cause more harm due to the consequences resulting from genuine emails that have been blocked or quarantined. Security filters that misidentify legitimate outbound messages as spam could also cause problems. According to the Osterman report, two-thirds of organizations surveyed said spam filtering solutions were not improving despite the technology maturing.
While the false positives problem plagues enterprises, small to medium sized companies who choose freemail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail are also at risk, said TrustSphere CEO Manish Goel.
“Freemail has no audit trail and opens up several opportunities for sensitive information to be leaked,” said Goel, who added ISPs also had a part to play in the battle against false positives.
Goel said markets whose users were not yet accustomed to broadband Internet were more prone to getting compromised by malware that could send malicious emails without users’ knowledge. This in turn would affect the reputations of the IP addresses an ISP used for mail delivery. Many such IP addresses would end up on an online tracker’s botlist and mail sent from these addresses will be blocked by receivers.
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