This Proofpoint-sponsored white paper by IDC recommends that healthcare organizations take a multipronged, human-centric approach to email security
Three out of four cyberattacks start with an exploitation of a human element. These attacks often start with bad actors sending emails using spoofed identities to target people. Threat actors also leverage generative AI (GenAI) to speed up the creation of authentic-looking and sounding email messages. These messages lure unsuspecting users into clicking on a link, opening an attachment that contains malware or ransomware, or revealing more information about themselves to enable identity and credentials theft. Human error can also cause data loss when an email is misdirected to an unintended recipient.
Threat actors and healthcare organizations are each racing to exploit AI and GenAI. Healthcare organizations will need data to train their models to understand relationships between recipients and senders and semantics to detect spurious emails. Behind every data loss incident is a person. Healthcare organizations require innovative educational approaches and teaching modules, such as brief training snippets, to instruct their employees on protecting themselves and their email. This is important because threat actors’ exploits are rapidly evolving. IDC believes the email security solutions market will continue to be important. To the extent that Proofpoint can address the challenges described in this paper, the company has a significant opportunity for success.
