How well do email security gateways protect against targeted attacks?

Email security gateways protection:  Email security test explores how and when services detect and stop threats

Latest report now online.

This new email protection test shows a wide variation in the abilities of the services that we have assessed.

You might see the figures as being disappointing. Surely Microsoft Office 365 can’t be that bad? An eight per cent accuracy rating seems incredible.

Literally not credible. If it misses most threats then organisations relying on it for email security would be hacked to death (not literally).

Email security gateways protection 

But our results are subtler than just reflecting detection rates and it’s worth understanding exactly what we’re testing here to get the most value from the data. We’re not testing these services with live streams of real emails, in which massive percentages of messages are legitimate or basic spam. Depending on who you talk to, around 50 per cent of all email is spam. We don’t test anti-spam at all, in fact, but just the small percentage of email that comprises targeted attacks.

In other words, these results show what can happen when attackers apply themselves to specific targets. They do not reflect a “day in the life” of an average user’s email inbox.

We have also included some ‘commodity’ email threats, though – the kind of generic phishing and social engineering attacks that affect everyone. All services ought to stop every one of these. Similarly, we included some clean emails to ensure that the services were not too aggressively configured. All services ought to allow all these through to the inbox.

So when you see results that appear to be surprising, remember that we’re testing some very specific types of attacks that happen in real life, but not in vast numbers comparable to spam or more general threats.

Threats at arm’s length

The way that services handle threats are varied and effective to greater or lesser degrees. To best reflect how useful their responses are, we have a rating system that accounts for their different approaches. Essentially, services that keep threats as far as possible from users will win more points than those who let the message appear in or near the inbox. Conversely, those that allow the most legitimate messages through to the inbox rate higher than those which block them without the possibility of recovery from a junk folder or quarantine.