Secure Email Gateway | IT NETWORKS

Email was one of the first things that people did when the world became connected in 1990s. 

It didn't need a large bandwidth back in time when technology and different connection lines were limited. 

It was also easy, fast, and didn't even cost a lot of money,

It was so easy and inexpensive that intelligent people saw it as a means to get a message to many people at little or no cost.

Some of these mails have become legitimate businesses and official proofs and were equivalent to advertising flyers send by post, but other mails were sent by more untrusted people in order to hack or to steel personnal information or identity online like postal addresses and emails, names and phone numbers.

That was the beginning of SPAM - the fact of sending irrelevant and unsolicited messages on the Internet to a large number of recipients in order to collect some information.

As people started to send and receive emails without verification or accountability, it offered anonymity.

in the beginning, people were thinking spamming more as a nuisance than a threat.

But in 1996, America Online (AOL) coined the term "phishing" to describe the practice of someone creating a phony account to engage unsuspecting people and tricking them to reveal sensitive information or to steel money.

Some of you may have met a character like Prince Solomon of Abadodo, or some other wiley character, who wanted to share their wealth. "Please provide your bank account information, and His Highness will kindly deposit a packet of gold."

Other bad actors registered domain names that were strikingly close to the names of legitimate businesses or organizations and masqueraded as that business in an email, coaxing you to click on a link or an attachment that contained malware.

The phishing technique relied on human naivety, carelessness or distraction in order to work.

One of the first responses of businesses was to educate their employees about phishing tactics.
However, while education can reduce phishing exploits, it could not eliminate the threat.

Something needed to be done at the mail server and the Internet Service Provider (ISP) levels. In response, businesses installed spam filters on the mail server to stem the tide of spam and phishing emails.

The spam filters relied on identifying certain words or patterns in the headers or bodies of the message.
To use a simple example, if the word "VIAGRA" is common to email spam, then the word could be added to the filter, which would eliminate any email that contained that word. These types of spam filters were also deployed by ISPs. In addition to filtering, the ISPs turned to strengthening authentication methods.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the ISPs began to implement the Sender Policy Framework, which slowly took shape during that decade but wasn't proposed as a standard until 2014.



The Sender Policy Framework is an email authentication method that detects bogus sender addresses and emails.

However, for every measure stood up by legitimate businesses, organizations, and ISPs, the bad actors introduced a countermeasure that circumvented the latest defense. To return to our simple example, spammers could easily bypass our filtered word "VIAGRA" by rendering it as V1AGRA or some other variant.

And while filters became more sophisticated in detecting spam patterns, they were too static and easy to outsmart.

Spamming and phishing were just too lucrative for bad actors to give up easily. In fact, phishing attacks have grown enormously since the turn of the century.

While, in 2004, 176 unique phishing attacks had been recorded, by 2012 this had grown to 28,000!

And no wonder, phishing was lucrative. Between lost money damages, the attacks caused a 500$ million loss to businesses and individuals. In the wake of these failures, the Secure Email Gateway, or SEG, arose to put up a more rigorous defense.

In addition to the spam filter, it added anti-virus scanners, threat emulation, and sandboxing to detect malicious attachments and links in real-time. Thus, even if education and the spam filter failed, one of these other tools could detect and expunge the threat.

However, the number of false positives and the huge number of attacks overwhelmed security professionnal teams, who became bogged down in manual remediation.

Secure Email Gateway continues to evolve as the threats evolve and cybersecurity enterprises like Palo ALto Networks or Fortinet continue updating their technologies and developing new techniques in order to protect their clients.

Today, the greater automation built into SEG alleviates the demands placed on the Security Operations Center (SOC).
Other features, such as Data Leak Prevention (DLP) have been added to detect and stop the egress of sensitive data.

In some cases, SEG has been integrated with other network security devices, such as edge and segmentation firewalls.
These devices collectively form an integrated fabric of security, which can be centrally managed from a single pane of glass and continually updated by threat intelligence as new methods and contagions become known.

For example, Fortinet has a Secure Email Gateway that is called FortiMail, this system is used to protect and analyse threats sent and received by emails;

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Security Email Gateways:
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CyberSecurity Evolution : UnKnown Threats:
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