Email Security Risk Assessment (ESRA)

New Mimecast ESRA Report Finds Millions of Spam, Tens of Thousands of BEC or Impersonation Attacks, Dangerous File Types and Malware Attachments being Delivered to Users’ Inboxes

LEXINGTON, Mass., Oct. 08, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Mimecast (MIME), a leading email and data security company, announced the availability of its latest #Email Security Risk Assessment (ESRA). The quarterly assessment is an aggregated report of tests that measure the efficacy of widely used email security systems.¹ This quarter’s ESRA report found a significant increase in Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks, emails containing dangerous file types, malware attachments and spam being delivered to users’ inboxes from incumbent email security systems.

BEC attacks, also referred to as email-based impersonation fraud, is an issue that is not going away because these attacks can easily evade many traditional email security systems on a global scale. The latest ESRA found a 269% increase in these types of attacks, in comparison to the same findings in last quarter’s report. This trend was also reflected in recent research, the State of Email Security 2019 report, which found that 85% of the 1,025 global respondents experienced an impersonation attack in 2018, with 73% of those victims having experienced a direct business impact – like financial, data or customer loss.