Keeping a network secure isn’t an easy task for IT administrators. Cyberattacks differ greatly in threat and capability. If a company overreacts to a cyber threat or implements the wrong technology, major expenses can incur and hackers may have an easier time getting in. But, preventing a malware attack on your network is easy with the right tools.
Despite what many security vendors proclaim, there isn’t one single security solution that will prevent every possible bad scenario. A magic solution isn’t real. IT professionals must thoroughly understand the risks posed to their business and what solutions can prevent them.
Due to limited resources and budgets, many companies focus instead on endpoint security to prevent, detect, and react to an online attack.
How Do Malware Attacks Get In?
The first practical step where technology and security solutions can help prevent a full attack from occurring is in the delivery stage of a cyberattack. Online threat deliveries come in many shapes and sizes such as phishing emails. Phishing emails are a successful form of cyberattacks with an incredible 30% open rate. That makes these emails the epicenter of the battle against cyber threats. Even surfing on non-protected devices is also dangerous, along with naïve employees. The combination of the three—email filtering, user security awareness, and web filtering—are imperative to successfully interrupt cyberattacks at the delivery stage.
How to Prevent a Malware Attack
The delivery stage of a cyberattack is the most inexpensive phase for companies to prevent malware attacks. Because of cloud-based services like Microsoft Office 365 and Gmail, malware interception can be easily implemented with almost no impact to usual business operations. With these cloud-based solutions, web surfing proxy services and email scanning located in the cloud or on-premises provide the majority of cyberattack defenses in the delivery stage.
What these solutions do is provide cyber defense value by ensuring an attack doesn’t get anywhere near an endpoint. Many of these malware endpoint protection services possess heuristic analysis capabilities and have multiple virus definition engines. However, cybercriminals are constantly learning and do occasionally sneak malware past these initial defenses.
Related: How to Future-Proof Endpoint Security
Cyberattacks that can bypass email filtering defenses include CEO fraud and the malware-less attack of business email compromise. The best defense against these forms of attacks is employee awareness. Training of this type will teach employees to verify requests or suspicious attachments via verbal confirmation. CEO fraud attacks are a big payday for cyber criminals and result in larger payoffs than ransomware. This is because they appear to be an executive authorized money transfer to another business partner.
The first layer of cyber defense should defeat an online attack before it reaches an endpoint. Email filtering, user awareness, and web filtering, along with cloud-based solutions, are a company’s first steps in preventing malware from accessing a network.
