Month: September 2020

10 Reasons Why You Should Archive your Emails

Sep 30, 2020 | Email Archiving

While the telephone remains a vital tool for business, a great deal of transactions and conversations now take place over email. More than 306 billion emails are now being sent every day and a business with 100 employees will typically send or receive around 4,000 emails a day, many of which will contain important information that is critical to the successful operation of the business.

The loss of emails could prove very costly for businesses, as much of the information stored in emails and email attachments is saved nowhere else. In the event of disaster, such as corrupted PST files, hardware failure, or a destructive cyberattack, email data could well be permanently lost.

Not only could the loss of email hamper the ability of a business to operate, it could potentially result in a significant financial penalty. 24% of organizations have reported receiving a request from a court or regulatory body to produce emails. If emails can’t be produced, the cost of the financial penalties do not even bear thinking about. They could prove catastrophic to a business.

Most businesses backup their emails as part of their disaster recovery plans, but there are problems with backups. Backups cannot be searched, so finding emails can take an extraordinary amount of time. To ensure that emails are never lost and can be found and recovered in a matter of seconds or minutes, most businesses choose to use an email archiving solution.

Here we list 10 of the most important reasons for using an email archiving solution.

10 Reasons Why Businesses Should Archive Emails

Data Loss Prevention

One the most important reasons for using an email archive is for data loss prevention. Emails are sent to the archive for long term, secure storage. If an employee accidentally deletes an important email from their inbox, the message will not be lost as it can easily be recovered from the archive.

Mail Server Performance

The amount of emails now being sent places a strain on email servers and having large volumes of emails stored on the server negatively affects server performance. Storage space can also become an issue. By sending emails to an archive, they can be removed for the mail server which will greatly improve performance.

Litigation and eDiscovery

In the event of a lawsuit, you are likely to be required to produce emails related to the case and you will only have a short period of time in which to respond. Finding emails in PST files and backups can be an extraordinarily time-consuming process, and you may have to search through several years of email data to find all the emails you need. You must also ensure that the messages are original and have not been altered in any way. An email archive makes responding to eDiscovery requests and finding and producing emails a quick and simple process.

IT Department Productivity

The IT department has to spend a considerable amount of time on managing the email system and resolving email storage issues. When employees delete or lose important emails, the IT support desk is expected to respond. Sending emails to an archive eliminates email storage issues and simplifies maintenance. Employees can be allowed to access their own archives and can easily search for emails, saving the IT department a lot of time that can be put to much better use.

Disaster Recovery

In the event of hardware failure, email data can easily be lost. Laptop computers may be lost or stolen, again resulting in the loss of email data. Ransomware and wiper malware attacks could easily wipe out the email system and could potentially result in critical data loss. By sending emails to the archive, in the event of disaster, emails can quickly and easily be recovered.

Regulatory Compliance

If you operate in a highly regulated industry you will need to retain email data for a set period of time, but all businesses must retain certain types of data, much of which is stored in email. An email archive helps with regulatory compliance. Data can be tagged and retention periods can be set, with emails automatically deleted when the legal retention period is over.

Data Access and Right to be Forgotten Requests

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other laws give individuals the right to request a copy of the information that a company holds on them. If a request for access to personal data is received, the data must be produced quickly. An email archive allows you to instantly search for email data and quickly respond to right-of-access and right-to-be-forgotten requests.

Internal Audits

There will likely be many occasions when you need to conduct internal audits of email data to find out what employees have been communicating via email. In the event of a customer dispute or an HR issue, you will need to search email data. An email archive makes this quick and easy, and allows you to resolve issues promptly without having to involve the IT department.

Business Continuity

In the event of disaster, you will need to have quick access to email. If an employee suddenly leaves the company, you will need to find all emails related to specific clients. With easy access to email and with the advanced search capability of an email archiving solution, you will be able to ensure business can continue as normal.

Cost Reduction

Searching for lost emails, managing email servers, responding to eDiscovery requests, and producing email data for audits can take an extraordinary amount of time. An email archive will slash the amount of time that needs to be devoted these issues and helps you avoid unnecessary costs. An email archiving solution will more than pay for itself in terms of the costs saved.

ArcTitan – Cloud-Based Email Archiving from TitanHQ

ArcTitan is a powerful, secure, cloud-based email archiving solution from TitanHQ that ensures you will never lose an email. ArcTitan acts as a black box flight recorder for email and gives you total protection against email data loss.

The solution is fully compliant with all industry regulations, email data is protected with end-to-end encryption and is encrypted in the archive, the solution is quick to set up, easy to use, and effortless to manage.

Lightning fast searches can be performed when you need to find emails, with emails sent to the archive automatically at a rate of 200 emails a second with searches of 30 million emails taking less than a second.

There are no limits on storage space, no onsite hardware requirements, and you only pay for the number of active mailboxes. Businesses that use ArcTitan typically save up to 80% of email storage space.

For more information on ArcTitan, details of pricing, or to book a free demo, call the ArcTitan team today!

Spike in Exploit Kit Activity Abusing Adult Ad Networks

Sep 22, 2020 | Internet Security, Web Filtering

Exploit kits used to be one of the most common methods of distributing malware, although their use has dwindled to a fraction of the level seen in 2016. That said, there has recently been an uptick in the use of exploit kits and multiple threat actors are conducting campaigns to deliver malware payloads.

An exploit kit is malicious code that incorporates exploits for one or more vulnerabilities. When a visitor arrives on a website hosting an exploit kit, their computer is scanned for vulnerabilities and if one that is being targeted, the exploit is executed and a malicious payload such as a banking Trojan, keylogger, or ransomware is silently downloaded.

Exploit kits are loaded onto websites under the control of the attackers, which can be their own domains or a legitimate site that has been compromised. Traffic is usually sent to the exploit kit through malicious adverts on third-party ad networks (malvertising). These ad networks are used by many websites for adding revenue-generating third party adverts.

According to research conducted by Malwarebytes, a campaign is being conducted using the Fallout exploit kit to deliver the Racoon Stealer, with the EK loaded onto popular adult websites. The campaign was reported to the ad network and the malicious advert was removed, only to be replaced with an advert directing visitors to a site hosting the Rig exploit kit.

Another campaign was identified involving a different threat actor who is known to have targeted various adult ad networks. The malicious adverts were displayed on a wide range of different adult websites, including one of the most popular adult websites that generates more than 1 billion page views a month.

The threat actor had submitted bids for users of Internet Explorer only, as the exploit kit contained an exploit for an unpatched IE vulnerability. The vulnerabilities exploited were CVE-2019-0752 and CVE-2018-15982, the former is an IE vulnerability and the latter is a vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player. In this campaign, Smoke Loader malware was delivered, along with Racoon Stealer and ZLoader.

For an exploit kit to work, a computer must have an unpatched vulnerability, an exploit for which must be included in the EK. Prompt patching is therefore one of the best ways of ensuring that these attacks are not successful. It is also strongly advisable to stop using Internet Explorer and Flash Player. Vulnerabilities in each are frequently targeted.

These campaigns can also easily be blocked by using a web filter. Unless your business operates in the adult entertainment sector, access to adult content on work devices should be blocked. A web filter allows your business to block access to all adult websites, and other categories of web content that employees should not be accessing in the workplace.

A cloud-based web filter such as WebTitan is a low cost solution that can protect against a web-based attacks such as exploit kits and drive-by malware downloads, while also helping businesses to improve productivity by preventing employees from visiting websites that have no work purpose. Web filters can also reduce legal liability by preventing employees from engaging in illegal online activities, such as copyright infringing file downloads.

Once implemented – a process that takes a few minutes – access to certain categories of website can be blocked with the click of a mouse and employees will be prevented from accessing websites known to harbor malware, phishing kits, and other potentially malicious websites.

For further information on WebTitan and protecting your business from web-based threats, give the TitanHQ team a call today.

Webinar Sept 22, 2020 – How to Ensure Business Continuity with a Remote Workforce

Sep 17, 2020 | Email Archiving, Industry News

COVID-19 has created a great many challenges for businesses and has forced them to adapt to a new way of working very quickly. Businesses that had mostly office-based workers have had to change to having virtually everyone working remotely.

Employees working from home are maintaining contact via IM solutions, email, and videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but in contrast to office-based work, businesses are now relying on their employees to stay connected and remain productive.

While most businesses have adapted to the new way of working, many business leaders are concerned about how to protect their data and maintain compliance with most of their employees working from home. Employers have had to accept that remote working, to some degree, is now the new normal, so steps must be taken to ensure business and email continuity.

On Tuesday, September 22, 2020, TitanHQ is hosting a webinar to discuss these and other concerns and offer a solution that can help to keep businesses moving forward when employees are working remotely.

During the webinar TitanHQ experts will discuss the following topics:

The Current 2020 Technology Landscape
Security & Compliance in a time of Global Remote Working
Increase in Companies Relying Solely on Office 365
Protecting Business Critical Data
The Importance of Continuity in the Era of Remote Working

Attendees will also be given a live demo of TitanHQ’s cloud email archiving solution, ArcTitan.

Webinar Details

Title: How to Ensure Business Continuity with Email Archiving for your Remote Workforce

Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Time:

London/Dublin: 5:00 pm (GMT +1)

USA: 12:00 pm ET; 09:00 am PT

Hosts:

James Clayton, ArcTitan Product Specialist

Derek Higgins, Engineering Manager, TitanHQ