Outbound Email Errors Cause 93% Increase in Breaches

IT leaders have suffered significantly higher numbers of data breaches as a result of outbound email in the last 12 months.

According to research by Egress, 93% of 538 IT leaders surveyed reported a breach in the past year due to an email error, with 70% of those believing remote working increases the risk of sensitive data being put at risk from outbound email data breaches.

Egress CEO Tony Pepper said the problem is only going to get worse with increased remote working and higher email volumes, which create prime conditions for outbound email data breaches of a type that traditional DLP tools simply cannot handle.

“Instead, organizations need intelligent technologies, like machine learning, to create a contextual understanding of individual users that spots errors such as wrong recipients, incorrect file attachments or responses to phishing emails, and alerts the user before they make a mistake,” he said.

The most common breach types were replying to spear-phishing emails (80%), emails sent to the wrong recipients (80%) and sending the incorrect file attachment (80%).

Speaking to Infosecurity, Egress VP of corporate marketing Dan Hoy, said businesses reported an increase in outbound emails since lockdown, “and more emails mean more risk.” He called this a numbers game which has increased risk as remote workers are more susceptible and likely to make mistakes the more they are removed from security and IT teams.

According to the research, 76% of breaches were caused by “intentional exfiltration.” Hoy confirmed this is a combination of employees innocently trying to do their job and not cause harm by sending files to webmail accounts, but t ..

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