Email gateway
What are Email Gateways & How do they work?
This article examines how email gateways work, the security flaws in them, and why modern AI-powered email security solutions provide better protection. Improve your email security beyond traditional gateways and stay ahead of emerging cyberthreats.
What is an email gateway?
An email gateway, or secure email gateway (SEG), is a solution designed to enhance the security of email communication. It acts as the first line of defense between the Internet and an organization’s internal network, safeguarding against incoming threats such as phishing, spear-phishing, and malware attacks. Email gateways are designed to prevent possible threats from reaching an organization’s mail server.
How does an email gateway work?
Email gateways use signature and reputation-based detection methods to safeguard against known email threats. Reputation-based detection scans and blocks emails from blacklisted IP addresses and senders, while signature-based detection examines email messages for signs of known threats and stops malicious messages from reaching the recipient.
Secure email gateways, once considered a reliable defense against cybercriminals, are susceptible to most modern cyberthreats. Here are a few reasons why:
- Limited protection against unknown threats
The vast majority of cyberthreats are unknown to reputation and signature-based scanners. These messages can bypass detection by email gateways and reach recipients even if they’re malicious. - MX record change
Implementing an email gateway requires modifying the MX record, which can expose information about your email security to hackers. MX records, responsible for routing emails to a domain, are publicly accessible. - Lack of internal protection
Email gateways operate outside of the local network, leaving the organization vulnerable to internal threats and insider attacks. - Absence of post-delivery remediation
Secure email gateways offer no way of addressing malicious emails once they have passed through the gateway. As a result, potentially malicious messages remain in users’ mailboxes, exposing them to threats.
The superior solution to an email gateway
Hornetsecurity offers an integrated suite of email security solutions that solve many of the disadvantages of email gateways. This includes protecting against known, unknown, and internal threats, eliminating the need for an MX record change, and offering post-delivery remediation. Our email security solutions leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and human insights to help organizations maximize their security with minimal effort.
Learn about HORNETSECURITY’S SERVICES
Interested in Related Topics?
Did you like our contribution to email gateways? Then other articles in our knowledge base might interest you as well! We help you learn more about cybersecurity related topics such as Emotet, Trojans, IT Security, Cryptolocker Ransomware, Phishing, GoBD, Cyber Kill Chain and Computer Worms.