Artificial Intelligence: A possible way to go when it comes to Email Phishing
The purpose with which email was so aggressively taken up for advancements itself makes it so prone to intrusion. Email is without doubt a powerful medium for commercial and to some extent personal communication. So, to facilitate its primary purpose, email security providers have to be very careful not to impose too many restrictions on its functioning. The scenarios of mailbox usages are endless, and the tricky task at hand is maintaining security while still preserving flexibility. This makes email one of the favourite points of entry for cybercriminals. And why would it not be? Practically 3.7 billion people (users of email) form an enormous victim pool.
According to statistics, in 2019 70 percent of organizations reported they had become victims of advanced phishing attacks. There are 56 million phishing emails sent every day, and it takes around 82 seconds for a phishing campaign to hook their first victim.
A potent answer to the question of email phishing is DMARC, a key-based authentication protocol that can detect whether an email actually originated from the supposed address in the sender’s field. Another means is human presence, i.e. physical operators monitoring email back-and-forth. However, spam mails can easily tire out people. Also, there some types of email attacks that force a person to give individual, careful attention to each individual email to weed out possible threats. To move past the disadvantage of this and other anti-phishing techniques, Artificial Intelligence steps in the picture.
AI’s ability to self-learn is exploited to provide maximal mailbox security. Moreover, AI can also scan metadata of the email like headers, signatures, IP addresses of the sending parties etc. The benefit of using AI is its expandability; it can be augmented with additional functionality like computer vision. This enables AI to scan inbound links and attachments and determine whether they are up to the mark or not. Since the primary learning mechanism of AI is a set of rules, it can easily be configured to automatically filter out fraudulent mails so you don’t even get exposed to them. Besides, you can program ‘bad words’ into your intelligent system so that emails containing these words are flagged as dangerous. You can either manually choose to trash/okay them or decide to automatically delete them.
AI is an evolving field and its full depths have yet to be explored. But its contribution to the field of cybersecurity seems very promising. Can it become an all-round solution for failsafe security? Only time will tell.
Logix Infosecurity provides security services that have been innovatively curated and refined to keep up with modern threats.