Last week, we touched on the emerging energy source of ‘hot plasma’ and how this could be a game-changer in providing clean energy with minimal environmental damage. Put succinctly, hot plasma could bring a world of free and limitless energy and render obsolete fossil fuels and certain types of nuclear power in one fell swoop if it lives up to its “fusion” hype.
Hot plasma technology relies on nuclear fusion (not to be confused with more dangerous and radioactive nuclear fission), and, like many revolutionary technologies, it has already been predicted in science fiction. We’ve often talked about the Terminator movies in this column as it related to AI turning against humanity. Interestingly, these killer robots were powered by small fusion reactor cells that could very well have harnessed hot plasma. Yikes, maybe the future isn’t as bright as we hoped.
At any rate, for better or worse, AI is here to stay. I’m not saying we’re getting closer to Terminators roaming the streets, but perhaps something more akin to IBM Watson-like intelligence (or beyond) on small digital assistants like what we saw in the movie Her (2013) where the AI is so convincing that the movie’s main character develops a ‘real’ relationship with it/her.
Getting back to 2022, as you may already know, RMail’s RSecurity human error prevention suite solves one of the biggest challenges not addressed by traditional email perimeter and gateway security services: BEC cyberattacks.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks — a sophisticated form of impostor email — are among the fastest growing and most concerning cybercrimes against organizations, according to a new report by Osterman Research (download here). BEC has caused billions of dollars in losses, generally in small business bites of a few thousand or few hundred thousand dollars at a time (per successful attack).
Most commonly, according to the Osterman Report, BEC attackers seek monetary payment as a direct outcome, and types of BEC attacks include (but are not limited to) diverting payment on a valid invoice to a fraudulent bank account, submitting a fake invoice for payment, diverting employee payroll to a fraudulent bank account, and using impersonation of senior executives to lend credibility to plausible but irregular requests.
According to Osterman, widespread ill-preparation against BEC attacks can be attributed to staff training usually being delivered out-of-context and to the fact that most technology solutions by design disrupt the flow of work and therefore lead to poor user adoption.
Since BEC is about trickery, causing us humans to make mistakes with financial consequence, the main way to solve for this is to build into Microsoft Outlook, a non-intrusive automated way to continuously sensitize staff to e-security, train them on how to think about sensitive email, and automatically encrypt or take other alert action when appropriate. Fortunately, RMail now does just that, simply put.
Inside RMail is a new module, RSecurity, that solves this BEC challenge with its RMail Recommends™ features (read more in product news release). Designed to provide in-the-email-flow end-user auto training and sensitization, it has been proven to increase user adoption whereas out-of-context manual training and complex features disrupt the flow of work and usually fail.
RMail Recommends™ uses advanced AI to predict what messages the sender might want to treat in a special manner and gently nudges them to do so, making it easy (and smartly automatic) to track, prove, certify, encrypt, or send encrypted specially to protect against wire fraud.
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Plus, you should know that over 80% of respondents in our most recent annual user survey agreed that “RMail is intuitive and easy to use” and that its key features “were easy to learn”.
Adoption of anti-BEC attack technology is vital for thwarting these attacks, and it’s great to know that ease-of-use is baked into RMail and, specifically, RSecurity. Granted you may not literally fall in love with it like in the movie “Her”, but it may save you and your organization a lot of trouble.
RSecurity is available now to new and existing RPost customers. Feel free to contact us to discuss how you can get started.
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