Email Security Needs an AI-Based Defence Strategy

In today’s changing electric environment, email remains at the heart of business communication, and therefore it remains a primary target for virtual risks. According to” Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024,” threat actors send a staggering 3 billion phishing emails every day, and 96 % of them use email as their primary source. Over$ 55.5 billion in losses have been made in the past ten years as a result of business email compromise ( BEC ).

Reactive measures and regular monitoring are no longer sufficient for the current state of e-mail security. A strategic and brilliant security plan, with AI at its base, is necessary in this new age.

The AI Arms Race: Evolving Email Threats

While AI has brought some business benefits, such as increased productivity and new creative options, it also enables adversaries to improve their phishing activities. For instance, generative AI ( GenAI ) creates a highly personalized attack pattern by combining the targeting precision of spear-phishing with the scale of commodity phishing. Advisors even engage their target in real-world back-and-forth conversations, putting crucial assets like personally identifiable information ( PII ) or financial transfers at greater risk than ever before.

Making it more difficult for security teams to organize users, given the increasingly complex email threats. For instance, phishing attempts mimic legitimate conference invites, and misrepresented, AI-generated senior messages are used to key employees. To store these threats, defenders may adopt complete, AI-driven security strategies.

Challenges With Traditional Security Approaches

Many businesses now share a number of issues that directly affect the resilience of email security in the face of these changing threats.

To overcome these challenges, organizations must adopt an AI-first security strategy that integrates exposure management, extended detection and response (XDR), security incident and event management ( SIEM), and AI across all defense layers. Defensive AI enables platforms to better understand attacker intentions from language, particularly in collaborative content, and to coordinate response plans across entrusted IT organizations.

Companies need integrated, continuous learning methods to adapt rapidly and reduce the risk of missed alerts with significant consequences as threat actors use AI tactics.

Developing Your AI-Driven Security Approach

The following three important factors should be taken into account to help you develop your safety plan and properly prepare your business for the changing email threat landscape:

1. Preventative Security

A model that prioritizes prevention must be developed instead of reactionary security. It benefits from XDR-level signals, and having a strong safety posture is essential to safeguard against request threats. Forecast threat modeling can be applied to help you understand how an intruder had move laterally through your organization based on poor configurations in this area of exposure management functionality. Knowing these insights and taking them into account will help you to improve the standing of your organization regardless of how your goods change as a result of a constant cycle in your defense.

2. A Integrated Software

It is crucial to integrate data from all possible strike surfaces in order to effectively combat the evolving e-mail danger landscape. While attacks usually start with message, they usually spread laterally. To be able to comprehensively respond to attacks, organizations should choose a safety plan based on a platform that integrates exposure management, XDR, and SIEM&nbsp, as the foundation for a systematic defense

3. AI at Every Layer of Your Defense

Unifying data allows for advanced AI and machine learning ( ML) models to be unlocked at every stage of an attack. It’s important to invest in a solution that works with large language model ( LLM)-based detections in conjunction with traditional detection methods when evaluating email security. Only LLM models can analyze the context of an email to fully understand the intent of the attacker, and use this information to filter malicious emails so they never arrive in your inbox because phishing campaigns are becoming more sophisticated. At the XDR level, AI can disrupt sophisticated BEC attacks, shortening response times and reducing analyst workload. GenAI agents will automate SOC workflows, speed up responses, and simplify investigations

Organizations will be better positioned to compete with attackers who constantly refine their methods by combining these three elements, which also become an essential part of email security. The unification of security solutions is essential in order to be able to address attacks holistically and protect your most valuable communication channels from compromise as techniques evolve more quickly. &nbsp,

By Ramya Chitrakar, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft

About the Author

Ramya Chitrakar, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, leads the product engineering teams responsible for developing advanced security solutions and AI-driven protection for Microsoft cloud platforms. She manages Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Defender for Identity, and Defender for Cloud Apps, protecting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Previously, she led engineering for Microsoft Intune, delivering core device management innovation to customers. Ramya holds a MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Chicago. &nbsp,