Cloudflare has announced a raft of new security tools for all its customers as it unveils a major safety push.
The company says that email continues being “one of the biggest security threats” for organizations, with various security tools being too expensive, overly complex, and hard to implement.
That’s why the company believes true email security has until now been reserved for Fortune 100 companies. This is about to change, with the new "enterprise-grade" services being made available when Cloudflare’s acquisition of Area 1 Security closes, the company confirmed.
Targeting the weakest link
“We recently made a significant investment in email security by agreeing to buy Area 1 Security,” explained Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.
“In the spirit of democratizing email security, we plan to bring several critical capabilities to businesses of any size. This is the future of Zero Trust (opens in new tab) security–where you have an integrated, one-click approach to securing any and all of your business applications.”
Company networks and communications infrastructure is mostly robust these days, with various defense mechanisms in place, such as firewalls, two-factor authentication, biometrics, zero-trust network architecture, antivirus software (opens in new tab), and more. That is why threat actors target employees, instead of systems, as they have become the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain.
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To reach those employees, threat actors will sometimes use social media networks, but most of the time, they’ll use email, as it’s cheap, easily automated, and widely used. Emails are used to phish out login credentials and other sensitive information, distribute backdoors, malware (opens in new tab), trojans and ransomware, or to learn more about the target company and its cybersecurity posture.
In order to stay secure, security software alone will not suffice, experts are warning. Instead, companies are urged to educate their employees on the dangers of phishing and social engineering, and conduct regular training sessions and phishing simulations, to assess the state of their security.
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