The AI Solution to One of Email’s Biggest Problems: Misdirected Emails

We’ve all had that moment when we hit ‘send’ on an email, only to realize moments later that it’s gone to the wrong person. Misdirected emails can happen to anyone and often lead to unintended consequences, such as compromising sensitive information and privacy. With billions of emails exchanged daily, the potential for mistakes is huge, especially when we rely on features like autocomplete to do the heavy lifting.

So, this article will look into the common causes and impacts of misdirected emails and how Hornetsecurity’s AI Recipient Validation tool can help you avoid these mishaps. Join us and discover how AI is transforming email security and safeguarding your communications from costly errors. 

The Risk of Misdirected Emails 

Email is still the basis for business communication and it is looking to stay like that for the foreseeable future, notwithstanding the rise of Microsoft Teams and Slack. Over 300 billion emails are exchanged daily, but do they all end up with the right person? One of the most common dangers to email security is sending an email to an unintended recipient because you’re tired, rushing, or under pressure.

Another problem might be that thanks to your work mobile device, the average person spends nearly a third of their working week on email, and people often rely on the autocomplete function. That seemingly innocent functionality that gives you a suggested recipient, when you’ve only typed part of the correct person’s address, makes it much easier to email a recipient with a similar name accidentally. Another common mistake can be when you mistakenly put unintended addresses into the “To” or “Cc” fields, rather than “Bcc”. The email recipients then become exposed to one another, opening a potential for sensitive data loss and compliance breaches. Any misdirected emails that end up in the wrong hands, could be considered as a prospective data breach. 

The Common Causes of Misdirected Emails and Their Consequences 

Misdirected emails are alarmingly common nowadays, and their cause is, sadly, human carelessness. While forgetting an attachment may be annoying, sending a message to the wrong recipients could pose serious privacy or security risks. For instance, a company employee might accidentally click ‘Reply-All’ and send sensitive medical information to the entire organization.

A misdirected email’s impact can vary and largely depend on what information was exposed. The impact is quite large for misdirected emails involving sensitive customer information, intellectual property, personally identifiable information, or other extremely sensitive data.  

At a minimum, the immediate and short-term impact involves various teams working on remediation, which can include: 

• Triage and investigation incidents: Regardless of the severity of the data breach, enterprises must initially devote hours to thoroughly researching the event and assessing the scope of the breach. 

• Legal review: The potential legal ramifications after a breach, legal, compliance, and risk management teams are included and consulted in every step of the way of misdirected email incidents. A few examples are mandatory notifications, contractual disclosure obligations, and the consequences of regulatory non-compliance, which, depending on the size of the breach, can take a few hours to several days, adding additional manpower and resources. 

• Reputation preservation and PR Campaign: The company normally starts a brand-building effort to lessen the impact on the company’s brand and future income. 

• Notifying the Customers: The communication strategy will vary depending on the kind of information disclosed. For example, when PII or other sensitive information is at stake, this may need to be an awkward conversation with a customer, or it may call for more thorough outreach. In this circumstance, enterprises need to give a formal notification about the breach and immediately provide customer identity protection. 

A real-world misdirected email example happened to Serco, an outsourcing company, after an employee mistakenly shared the email addresses of nearly 300 contact tracers in the UK. The error occurred when an email to new COVID-19 contact-tracing trainees was sent using CC instead of BCC, revealing all recipients’ addresses. Although no patient data was involved, this mistake could breach data protection rules. Serco, responsible for authorizing 15,000 non-clinical tracers, stated that it would review its processes thoroughly in order to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future. 

365 AI Recipient Validation: Your AI-Based Email Validator to Prevent Data Loss and Security Breaches  

365 AI Recipient Validation is an email validation tool that assists your business with data loss and prevents accidental email misdirection, ensuring that sensitive information reaches only the intended recipients. The tool uses machine learning to analyze emails based on the user’s previous communication and prevent “abnormal” deviations and discrepancies between the senders and the recipients.  

Senders are immediately notified when the email they’re trying to send triggers a warning, giving them a chance to make corrections. By continuously adapting to user behavior, the AI ensures that suggestions and warnings become more accurate over time, minimizing human errors.

In sensitive industries like healthcare and finance, the stakes are high when it comes to email security. Therefore, having a reliable solution that adds another layer of security is paramount. Here are four key advantages of AI Recipient Validation: 

• Avoid regulatory fines: The AI tool helps ensure sensitive data isn’t accidentally exposed via misdirected emails, reducing the risk of data breaches that could lead to GDPR fines of up to 4% of annual turnover or €20 million, whichever is greater. 

• Customer trust: These days, people in general are taking a much stricter approach towards their data privacy and not only the regulatory agencies. A data leak erodes the trust that partners, shareholders, and customers have in a company. Customers may get disenchanted with a business and choose a rival if they learn of lost or missing data through official reports, word-of-mouth, bad press, or social media posts. 

• Protect reputation: Preventing these incidents safeguards an organization’s reputation, declining employee embarrassment and criticism of security leaders for inadequate controls. 

• Minimize auditing costs: According to a study, external auditors usually bill breached organizations more for their audit services in the year of the event. In addition, auditors are scrutinizing processes more closely now that there has been a recent breach. Increased workloads for audits result from this, and if any faults are found, the organization will need to spend more time and money on corrective action. 

365 AI Recipient Validation works in the background to minimize the risk of unavoidable mistakes of employee negligence, which can lead to significant data breaches and regulatory penalties.  

Request a demo today and discover how 365 AI Recipient Validation can enhance your email security! 

Why AI is the Future of Email Security 

Email has always been the favorite and most efficient attack vector for threat actors to obtain financial gain, account credentials, and sensitive information from their victims. In response, businesses have implemented email security solutions to examine incoming, outgoing, and internal email traffic to detect fraudulent messages and thwart attacks before they escalate into expensive crises. To increase the effectiveness of their crimes, threat actors constantly alter their assault strategies, and organizations adjust their defensive stance to remain one step ahead.  

The traditional detection techniques used by email security solutions in the past include signatures such as (“We’ve seen this message before”), rules (“don’t allow messages with EXE attachments”), blocklists (“always block all messages from this domain”), and allow lists (“emails from these domains are always good”). Sure, we are still catching plenty of attacks with the standard security practices, but half the battle now is just stopping Steve in finance from emailing our client list to his fantasy football league. AI can be our digital superhero, swooping in to save us from our own ‘oops’ moments! 

Conclusion 

Traditional Data Loss Prevention solutions can be costly to operate and are often complex to deploy. It does block a small percentage of malicious emails, though, however Hornetsecurty AI Recipient tool is at the opposite extreme of the spectrum. Even while misdirected emails do not necessarily indicate criminal conduct, there are nevertheless serious repercussions and an easily calculable return on investment. All we need to do is count the number of workers who were about to take action, such as forwarding a sensitive email to the incorrect person or moving confidential information outside the organization but refraining due to the available remedy, AI.