Protection against hyperlinks and attachments

  • 10 October 2014
  • 4 replies
  • 32 views

Hi everyone,
 
Just have a query on what people do to protect themselves from users opening malicious hyperlinks. 
We recieved an email, which one of our users opened. They clicked on the embedded hyperlink and downloaded a virus which was luckily caught straight away by the AV. The category for the site was "society" in the webroot web security. 
 
We have webroot web security, webroot antivirus and a spam filtering software installed. User education is also a big factor we will focus on again. 
I would just like to know if there is any other option I may be missing besides disabling all hyperlinks from emails. It would be also interesitng to see what other companies do in this area. 
 
We are running outlook 2010 and 2013. 
 
Thanks in advance,
 
Brian

4 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +56
Normally our reputation service should catch these, but some do still slip through.
Hi,
 
Thanks for the reply.
 
What are you reffering to when you say reputation service?
 
Is there any other ways I can combat this?
 
Regards,
 
Brian
Userlevel 7
Badge +56
So we have a big database with reputation information for URLs and IP addresses.  If a user tries to go to a site that is marked as possibly malicious, then Webroot will block the site.  This is similar to Google when you try to click on a malicious link that you find through search.
 
So the main approaches are:
1. User training
2. A URL reputation service
3. Filtering email for malicious links
Userlevel 6
Hi @!
 
No solution can protect you against 100% of all threats, so like Nic said it's most important to educate your users.
I have writen some 'newsletters' regarding malicious emails to my colleagues and got them to be more suspicious.
 
Besides that it's best to implement a layered security environment:
  • Endpoint Antivirus and Firewall
  • Websecurity Solution
  • Hardware/Software Edge Firewall
  • Webfiltering
  • Antispam
  • Antimalware Gateway (most effective if it uses a solution from a different vendor than your Endpoint solution)
  • restricted rights on endpoints / application control /...
 

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