Introducing Expedite V2: For Smarter Destination Management
Introducing Expedite V2: For Smarter Destination Management
Written By
Anne Aketch
Publish Date
02/12/2024
Categories
BlogsHot TopicServices & Solutions
For DMCs time and accuracy are everything. AI-powered Expedite is now the cornerstone of DMC efficiency and with the launch of Expedite V2, we’re taking innovation to the next level. Designed to handle the evolving complexities of the travel and hospitality landscape, V2 is transforming how DMCs manage data, inventory, and seasonal demands.
Why Expedite?
1. Contract Management & More
Expedite V1 streamlined the painstaking task of extracting data from hotel contracts and populating DMC inventory systems. V2 is even smarter. It dynamically handles seasonal updates, including:
Stop Sales
Promotions
Special Offers
It the smart way to eliminate the need for manual updates, reducing human error and saving countless work hours.
2. Goodbye To Seasonal Changes
Seasonal offers and promotions can be a DMC’s logistical nightmare, requiring hours of meticulous updates. Expedite V2 automates this process, ensuring your inventory reflects real-time changes without breaking a sweat leaving you to focus on delivering exceptional experiences.
Over 90% time savings: Free your team from hours of tedious contract processing. Expedite will do it in minutes, not hours.
24x operational speed: Expedite V2 processes three contracts per hour, supercharging your competitiveness.
Impeccable accuracy: Eliminates human error risks, ensuring your data is flawless and your decisions are data-driven.
4. Scale Seamlessly
Expedite V2 adapts to portfolio expansion and seasonal/promotional spikes. With machine learning at its core, it grows with your business, managing higher data volumes effortlessly.
5. Enhancing Customer Service
By automating updates and inventory adjustments, Expedite V2 gives DMCs the freedom to focus on customers. It enables you to:
Respond to inquiries faster.
Execute promotions seamlessly.
Deliver unforgettable travel experiences without operational hiccups.
Why Now?
Expedite is reshaping the hospitality and travel landscape, delivering transformative gains that make DMCs more competitive and resilient.
Ready to Expedite Your Success?
Join the growing list of DMCs who are transforming their operations with Expedite V2. Book your free consultation today and see how V2 will make your business faster, smarter, and more resilient.
5 Ways Expedite Can Ease DMCs’ Rising Cost Challenges
5 Ways Expedite Can Ease DMC’s Rising Cost Challenges
Written By
Anne Aketch
Publish Date
28/11/2024
Categories
BlogsHot TopicServices & Solutions
The recent Global DMC Partners’ 10th annual Connection revealed DMCs are struggling with 30% higher costs across airfares, accommodations, staffing, and more. Keeping up while delivering quality experiences is getting tougher. Budgets are ballooning just to maintain current offerings, making the need for streamlined efficiency and cost-saving solutions more urgent. Here’s where Expedite, our AI-powered, context-driven data management solution, is the game-changer DMCs need.
1. Achieve Over 90% Time Savings
Imagine slashing contract processing times from 10 hours to just 45 minutes. That’s what a top hospitality client has already realized thanks to Expedite’s groundbreaking AI. DMCs can now reinvest time into enhancing service quality.
2. Operate 24x Faster
Expedite’s AI processes up to three contracts per hour – that’s a 24x improvement in output and supersonic times to market. Expect fewer bottlenecks and better management of peak travel and seasonal high volumes, all while maintaining service excellence.
Expedite’s advanced AI ensures impeccable data extraction and validation, significantly reducing human errors. DMCs can now trust their data, reduce rework, and make faster, more informed decisions.
4. Effortlessly Scale Operations
Whether you’re dealing with seasonal demand spikes or expanding your portfolio, Expedite’s adaptive algorithms scale seamlessly with your needs. As your workload increases, the AI learns and optimizes, managing growing data volumes without sacrificing performance or reliability.
5. Delivering Top-Tier Customer Service
Expedite goes beyond just automation. It helps manage inventory efficiently, adjusts dynamically for seasonal offers, and handles ad hoc customer queries with ease meaning DMCs can elevate client experiences, provide prompt responses, and execute special promotions smoothly.
Ready to Transform Your Operations?
Expedite is reshaping the hospitality and travel landscape, delivering transformative gains that make DMCs more competitive and resilient.
The financial services industry is rapidly transforming, driven by the need for modernization, improved security, and the ability to meet evolving customer demands. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is at the forefront of this transformation, offering financial institutions a powerful platform to spearhead innovation while addressing critical industry needs, including regulatory compliance, risk management, and secure remote access.
AVD is changing the way financial institutions operate, providing a secure, scalable, and cost-effective platform that enables innovation while managing risks and staying compliant with industry regulations. From enabling secure remote work to modernizing core infrastructure, AVD offers the financial services industry the tools it needs to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. Here we outline the benefits AVD can bring to the sector, including cost savings, and detail how one industry major reaped them.
Enabling Secure Remote Work
One of the most significant challenges facing financial services is enabling large-scale remote work without compromising security or compliance. Azure Virtual Desktop allows financial institutions to quickly deploy secure virtual desktops, providing employees, traders, and banking partners with safe access to critical applications and data from anywhere, on any device.
AVD offers the only multi-session Windows 10/11 experience, allowing multiple users to work on a single virtual machine, significantly reducing costs. The platform also ensures a low-latency connection, essential for high-frequency trading, while providing virtual high-powered computing desktops to support complex app development.
Improved Risk Management & Compliance
Financial services are highly regulated, and ensuring compliance across regions is critical. AVD offers robust features that improve risk management and compliance with strict industry regulations, such as PCI, SOX, and SOC 1 and SOC 2 certifications. Financial institutions can control and customize virtual machine configurations, ensuring secure access to data across borders and complying with region-specific regulations.
Additionally, AVD provides advanced security services, including isolated user sessions, reduced attack surfaces, and granular access controls to protect sensitive financial data. Features like device redirection control and disabling clipboard and screen capture further protect information.
Optimize work load efficiency
Corporate or Ensure you’re using the right resources by choosing services that match your needs. Right-size your resources to prevent over-provisioning, and configure autoscaling to adjust resources based on demand, reducing waste during off-peak periods. Spot VMs can offer up to 90% savings for non-mission-critical tasks, like batch processing.ontract law professionals can use Copilot to automate the review and drafting of legal documents. AI speeds up this normally time intensive task and lowers the chance of human error.
Modernizing Core Banking & Payment Infrastructure
Banking and financial services’ legacy systems often hinder the ability to roll out new products and services. AVD helps modernize core banking and payment infrastructures, allowing providers to migrate legacy applications to the cloud and increase their agility.
Azure enables financial services to scale their computing power as needed, ensuring that storage and resources are available without delay. Whether dealing with payment processing, capital markets, or data analytics, AVD helps streamline operations by allowing institutions to scale up or down effortlessly.
Migrating data and applications to Azure enables faster rollout of banking and payment services, meeting customer demands while avoiding prohibitive hardware refresh costs.
AVD delivers a cost-effective solution tailored for financial services. With pay-as-you-go pricing, financial institutions can optimize costs by eliminating the need for extensive hardware procurement and infrastructure investment. Financial services benefit from up to 72% savings through Windows 10/11 multi-session capabilities, which allows multiple users to work on a single virtual image.
Institutions can also minimize costs by avoiding lengthy hardware procurement and leveraging flexible, scalable virtual environments that don’t require multiple licensing costs.
Success Story: FIS Transformation
Financial services giant (Fidelity Information Services) FIS has embraced AVD to modernize its infrastructure and reduce costs. By leveraging AVD, FIS has streamlined onboarding and security processes, reduced hardware and infrastructure expenses, and improved overall efficiency. FIS can now onboard employees, traders, and contractors quickly without the need for in-person office visits, laptops, or desktops while temporary staff can access all they need on their own devices with access securely managed through Azure.
Additionally, a centralized administration team monitors and audits access to virtual resources, simplifying security and compliance management while ensuring sensitive data remains protected.
AVD – You Can Bank On It!
Ready to learn more and explore how Azure Virtual Desktop can empower your organization to thrive in the digital age? Contact us at sales.uae@cobweb.com or call +971 4 455 3100.
Globally the healthcare landscape is evolving rapidly. Demand for agile, secure, and cost-effective technology solutions is greater than ever. With the rise of telehealth, the need to securely manage patient data and improve care delivery across various locations is a primary focus. The powerful Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) solution can help address these challenges providing numerous key benefits for an increasingly sophisticated healthcare sector. We explore the opportunities here:
Ehanced Patient Engagement
With AVD healthcare providers can elevate patient engagement through virtual resources and tools, with clinicians able to connect with patients both on-site and remotely. This flexibility helps facilitate more frequent interactions, which can lead to improved patient outcomes. Custom-built, HIPAA-compliant applications also allow for remote monitoring, offering patients access to high-quality care regardless of where they are.
For physical care scenarios, AVD enhances bedside experiences by enabling access to virtual tools that streamline patient engagement and allow real-time monitoring and assessments. Whether in a clinical setting or from home, Azure helps bridge the gap between patients and care teams.
Improved Care Team Collaboration
Collaboration is essential for healthcare teams, especially in fast-paced environments where care coordination is critical. AVD enables care teams to work together seamlessly, whether they are on-site or across different locations. With tools like Microsoft Teams integrated into AVD, clinicians can conduct virtual rounds, share patient data, and coordinate treatments in real time.
These collaborative tools are HIPAA-compliant and optimized for healthcare workflows, allowing teams to schedule, collaborate, and adjust care plans as needed.
Azure comes with compliance frameworks, including HIPAA and GDPR, taking the guesswork out of regulatory adherence. This provides peace of mind for healthcare organizations, particularly those working across geographies, knowing that they are meeting industry standards while safeguarding critical patient information.
Operational Efficiency
AVD allows healthcare organizations to unify patient data from multiple sources, improving the ability to analyse and act upon insights. This is particularly beneficial in large, multi-location healthcare systems where patient data is distributed across various platforms. AVD provides engineers and clinicians with access to unified data sources, enabling automation, real-time monitoring, and more efficient data management.
This connectivity also boosts clinical efficiency by streamlining operations. Whether it’s automating administrative processes or rapidly deploying new technologies, AVD helps healthcare providers focus on delivering care rather than managing complex IT systems.
Cost-Effective Solutions
Healthcare organizations often struggle with the cost of hardware procurement and maintenance. AVD minimizes these expenses by offering a cloud-based solution that requires minimal upfront investment in physical infrastructure. With pay-as-you-go pricing, organizations only pay for the resources they use, which can lead to cost savings of up to 72%.
AVD also allows organizations to quickly deploy virtual desktops and apps, making it an ideal solution for handling sudden increases in demand or supporting remote work initiatives. This agility enables healthcare organizations to scale their operations without the delays and costs associated with procuring and setting up new hardware.
Scalable & Intuitive Technology:
A primary advantage of Azure Virtual Desktop is its ease of use. With a familiar Windows interface, healthcare professionals can seamlessly transition to the virtual environment without experiencing adoption lag. AVD also offers scalable performance, which can expand based on patient volume or organizational needs.
Whats Next?
If you’re looking to streamline your healthcare operations and deliver better patient outcomes, and what to explore how more about how Azure Virtual Desktop can make it happen, reach out to us on: email: sales.uae@cobweb.com or call +971 4 455 3100.
Cloud computing offers immense scalability and flexibility, but optimizing costs remains a common challenge. Here our Azure Practice Lead and Azure Solutions Architect Shailesh Vaja offers updated strategies and shares some Tips and Tricks for Azure cost optimization that can help you maintain high performance and achieve your business goals while staying within budget.
1. Plan with Cost in Mind
Before you deploy, assess your business needs, expected usage, and performance demands. Use tools like the Azure Pricing Calculator to estimate costs based on regions and configurations, and Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator to compare cloud vs. on-premises expenses. The Azure Well-Architected Framework offers best practices for building cost-efficient cloud solutions.
2. Track and Analyze Regularly
Use Azure Cost Management to monitor spending across subscriptions and services. Set up budgets and alerts and rely on Azure Advisor for personalized recommendations to optimize spending. Consider Azure Policy to enforce rules that control resource usage and prevent costly misconfigurations
3. Optimize work load efficiency
Corporate or cEnsure you’re using the right resources by choosing services that match your needs. Right-size your resources to prevent over-provisioning, and configure autoscaling to adjust resources based on demand, reducing waste during off-peak periods. Spot VMs can offer up to 90% savings for non-mission-critical tasks, like batch processing.ontract law professionals can use Copilot to automate the review and drafting of legal documents. AI speeds up this normally time intensive task and lowers the chance of human error.
4. Leverage Azure Reservations and Hybrid Benefits
Commit to 1- or 3-year reservations for services like VMs and databases to save up to 72%. The Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to bring existing on-premises licenses for Windows or SQL Server to Azure, reducing costs by paying for the base compute rate only.
5. Use Azure Savings Plans for Compute
For consistent compute usage, Azure Savings Plans for Compute offer discounts of up to 65% off pay-as-you-go pricing. These flexible plans cover VMs, App Services, and Functions, with automatic application of savings across eligible resources.
Optimizing Azure costs is a dynamic process of planning, monitoring, and action. By following these best practices and leveraging Azure’s cost management tools, you can maximize your cloud investment while staying within budget. If you need more help or guidance on Azure cost optimization, feel free to contact us at sales.uae@cobweb.com or call +971 4 455 3100.
Better still, join Shailesh Vaja for our October 9th webinar when he’ll introduce participants into the ways to maximise their Azure performance and optimise their Azure spend.
If you need more help or guidance on Azure cost optimization, feel free to contact us at sales.uae@cobweb.com or call +971 4 455 3100.
In the dynamic world of IT management, streamlining tasks and enhancing efficiency isn’t just beneficial; it’s essential. Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI assistant, is transforming how IT managers and professionals handle their daily workload. By integrating Copilot into your IT operations, you can elevate your productivity and precision to new heights.
Start Your Day with Copilot, Not Coffee
As an IT manager, mornings can be hectic, filled with catching up on missed meetings and setting the day’s agenda. With Copilot’s integration with tools like Jira, you can have a prioritized list of tasks and updates ready before your first cup of coffee. No need to sift through countless emails or dashboards—Copilot does the heavy lifting, ensuring you start your day efficiently.
Streamlining Stakeholder Communications
Preparing for stakeholder meetings can be overwhelming, requiring you to stay on top of every message, document, and task. Copilot’s seamless integration with communication platforms like Teams helps you summarize key points and action items. This ensures you enter each meeting fully informed and ready to engage effectively.
Streamlined documentation and reporting
IT Managers are often bogged down with processing documentation, reporting, and preparing presentations. Copilot’s assistive features in Word and PowerPoint transform these manual, time-consuming processes into quick, effortless tasks. You can generate comprehensive proposals and presentations from your data, complete with key insights and actionable steps, all while maintaining focus on content that resonates with your stakeholders.
Analyzing IT strategies and technical reviews demands attention to detail and the ability to categorize information by impact, initiative, and financial implications. Copilot in Excel serves as your analytical partner, helping you summarize complex data into coherent, stakeholder-friendly tables saving you time and presenting data effectively.
Wind Down with Effective Feedback and Followups
As the working day nears a close, providing feedback on initiatives and projects is crucial. Drafting clear, concise, and actionable emails to stakeholders ensures continuous improvement and engagement. Copilot’s functionality within Outlook simplifies this process, keeping your projects on track and your team informed.
Copilot Advanced IT for Efficient IT Managers
For IT managers, Copilot is more than just a tool—it’s a digital assistant that adapts to your needs, streamlines your workflow, and empowers you to focus on delivering value and innovation within your organization. Every minute counts, and Copilot ensures your business keeps pace and sets efficiency standards for the entire organization.
By integrating Copilot into your working day, you get more than just a license; you gain a competitive edge.
Interested in learning how Copilot can elevate your IT operations? Contact us for licensing details and expert Copilot consulting services to harness the full potential of your IT infrastructure management.
Microsoft’s artificial intelligence assistant Copilot is well known for its ability to cut through mundane tasks enabling people to draft content and summarise meetings quicker and in context but its newest version, which went live this year, has major implications for improving enterprise efficiency and productivity. Here’s how:
Assisting Software Development:
Copilot can help complete lines of code, debugging, or even writing entire functions and GitHub Copilot can help programmers simplify their coding process. So instead of spending time on routine coding tasks or searching for bugs in code, developers can focus on complex problem-solving and innovation.
Helps Content Creation:
Copilot applications like Jarvis and Copy.ai make it easier for writers to create copy. These tools help generate marketing copy and more so that writers can focus on research, strategy, and execution.
Assisting With Legal Documentation:
Corporate or contract law professionals can use Copilot to automate the review and drafting of legal documents. AI speeds up this normally time intensive task and lowers the chance of human error.
HealthCare Diagnosis & Treatment Plans:
Copilot can help medical professionals in diagnosing conditions and creating personalized treatment plans. Combining Copilot with a medical database offers quick access to relevant information, which leads to faster and more accurate diagnoses and more effective treatment strategies. The result is improved patient care experiences.
Copilot can help customer service representatives deliver faster and more accurate support. AI can suggest the best responses or solutions by analysing customer queries and improving customer satisfaction. Copilot skims available information to provide a detailed summary and overview helping businesses maintain high service levels.
Creating Personalized Learning Experiences in Education:
Using Copilot in education enables faster creation of learning materials and the ability to cater to individual learning styles. Currently, learning materials are created for mass consumption but not everyone learns at the same pace or at the same level. Through Copilot and adaptive AI, a more tailored approach to distance learning can be created so that students at all stages of the learning curve have content available to them through more accessible means.
Predictive Modelling & Data Analysis in Finance:
Banking, investment, or insurance professionals constantly make decisions based on data. Using Copilot automation to improve the data analysis enables faster identification of trends and quicker strategic decision-making.
Digital Marketing Campaign Optimization:
Copilot can optimize advertising campaigns and strategy planning to enable digital marketers to analyse their audience faster and with more depth. Automation can analyse data from a previous campaign and suggest improvements, target demographics, and content strategies that lead to higher engagement rates and ROI. Marketers can then consistently refine their efforts to reach wider audiences and gain maximum impact.
Improving Supply Chain Management Logistics:
Automation delivers a competitive edge in logistics and distribution. Planning optimal routes, managing inventories, and predicting demand take considerable time and manpower. Through Copilot, operations are more efficient, costs are lowered, and operators can pivot to meet demands faster while preparing for future demand.
Architects and designers can use Copilot applications to enable more efficient design processes by providing real-time suggestions and automate parts of the design process. Professionals then have more time to explore creative solutions while project development and client presentations become much easier to shape.
Want to know more about how Copilot can supercharge your efficiency and productivity? Contact us for expert Copilot consulting. email: sales.uae@cobweb.com or call +971 4 455 3100.
As cyber attacks become more advanced and intricate, being clued up on the different kinds of threats you’ll face is vital.
There are a plethora of different attacks in the arsenal of the modern attacker, so knowing what you’ll be up against is important for any modern organisation. By preparing yourself and knowing what you’re up against, you can ensure that you’re secure.
That’s why in this article, we’re going to go over the eight most common forms of cyberattack that you’ll face in 2023, and how you can get started in protecting yourself today.
Phishing
Phishing — the most common form of attack — is trying to trick someone to get their details. Usually using realistic-looking important emails from what would be a reputable source, a phishing attack aims to trick the victim into thinking that they’re someone else.
For example, common phishing attacks tend to be scammers pretending to be Amazon or a bank, trying to get card details off of unaware victims. These scams are easy to fall for if you’re not vigilant.
Malware-based Attacks
Malware is software that is used in a malicious manner. This will be software within your system that is usually built to do damage to your infrastructure. With this, hackers can easily cause significant damage throughout your system and steal your data.
Malware traditionally comes in the form of a trojan attack — named after the trojan horse, in which the malware is bundled with another piece of harmless software. This is an easy way to get the ‘payload’ (the virus) into your system to wreak havoc.
Enforcing security compliance throughout your organisation and educating on the dangers of downloading files from unknown sources is the best way to stop malware from entering your organisation.
Investing in good antivirus software throughout your business is also a way to stamp out malware at the roots. If you’re looking to get started with good antivirus software, get in touch with us today.
Denial of service (DOS) attacks are attacks that aim to simply disable the day-to-day infrastructure of a business. DOS attacks will usually send lots of requests to a server with the aim to overload it. This will deny service to your whole organisation and can be very crippling.
Tools like Azure DDOS Protect offer protection from DOS attacks by enforcing limits on the number of requests that can be sent to your server in one go. These attacks are simply stoppable by having the correct security — to make sure that you’re secure against DOS attacks, get in touch today.
Spoofing
Spoofing attacks are the type of attacks where the attacker masquerades as trusted personnel to push someone to do something. This attack uses social engineering to take advantage of a victim and manipulate them to the attacker’s ideal outcome.
IP Spoofing attacks are a specific kind of spoofing attack that comes with your typical DOS attack. This is when packets are altered to appear that they’re coming from a trusted network, to gain access to the server. This is why monitoring network activity within your organisation is crucial.
Credential Stuffing
Credential stuffing is when an attacker uses stolen credentials to try to log into as many websites as possible. The aim is to target those who reuse credentials — when the credentials are breached on one website, credential stuffing allows the attacker to try to access other websites and accounts using the same credentials.
If a victim is successfully breached, a hacker could potentially gain control of every account they have — including work accounts. This is why encouraging and enforcing good password hygiene is crucial (as well as ensuring password changes are enforced throughout your organization).
Supply Chain Attacks
Supply chain attacks are intricate attacks in which an attacker would target a third-party organisation to try to launch an attack into your system by infecting their services with some kind of payload.
This is usually to try to cause crippling damage to your organisation in a completely unexpected way or to cause damage to multiple organisations at once.
The aim of this is to access a secure system from a much less secure breach point, to try to gain access to the organisation and breach through the security that is currently protecting your system.
Insider Threats
Insider threats are when an insider — someone within your organisation — does something to harm your organisation. This is uncommon, but can sometimes happen as part of revenge attacks or other forms of corruption.
The number of types of attacks that can occur from an insider is endless — from theft, to sabotage, and even physical violence, these can be hard to protect yourself against.
The best way to make sure that this isn’t a threat to you is to make sure to monitor staff and security and ensure that employees only have access to what they need to complete their tasks.
Manin-the-Middle Attacks
A man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack is when something is intercepting communications between two points. This can be either to collect information or possibly even sabotage the communication between two points.
This is an attack which is often not used due to the keyway to beat it — end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption is a must for any modern organisation, as it ensures that all data is transmitted between two points securely.
How We Can Secure Your Business
Cybersecurity knowledge is of utmost importance for any organisation looking to fend off any attackers and malicious users. By educating yourself and your organisation on these threats, you can ensure that your organisation is prepared and protected going forward.
There are software and tools available to help counteract cyber-attacks, and they can be a huge help in keeping your organisation secure. If you’re looking to get started with security tools, get in touch with us today. We’ll be able to help secure your organisation and ensure that your security posture is unbreakable.
In today’s digital age, email has become the backbone of business communication. With an astounding 361.6 billion emails sent and received daily—a figure projected to reach 392.5 billion within the next two years—it’s clear that email is indispensable in our professional lives. However, this massive reliance on email also presents a significant drawback: it has become the preferred entry point for cybercriminals aiming to infiltrate sensitive data, often leading to devastating consequences for businesses.
The email security landscape is deteriorating rapidly as cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated. Alarmingly, over 90% of cyberattacks begin with a simple email, with many attacks cleverly designed to bypass standard defenses like Microsoft’s. As cybercriminals up their game, it’s critical that businesses also strengthen their defenses.
Enter Mimecast: AI-Powered Email Security for a New Era
At the forefront of this battle against email-borne threats is Mimecast, a leader in email security solutions. Recognizing the escalating dangers, Mimecast is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to fortify its defenses with the new Mimecast Email Security Cloud Integrated (CI) solution. This cutting-edge tool is specifically designed to enhance and extend the protective capabilities of Microsoft 365, making it a vital asset for any organization looking to bolster its email security.
Mimecast’s approach to email security is all about flexibility and effectiveness. Whether a business requires advanced administrative controls for a complex email environment, or a quick-to-deploy solution optimized right out of the box, Mimecast delivers top-tier security tailored to meet diverse needs.
In a world where remote work has become the norm, employees and organizations are more vulnerable to email-based cyberattacks than ever before. Business Email Compromise (BEC) and other sophisticated threats are now rampant, as cybercriminals exploit the distractions and less secure environments of remote workers. With workers logging in from various locations—be it home, hotels, or coffee shops—sometimes even using personal devices, the risk of inadvertently opening a malicious email or clicking a harmful link has never been higher.
Mimecast’s CI Solution – a Game-Changer
For IT and security teams, the challenge of securing email has never been more daunting. With attack volumes and sophistication on the rise, businesses need solutions that are both robust and easy to manage. Mimecast’s newest offering, Email Security CI, is an integrated cloud solution that enhances Microsoft 365 protections without requiring an MX record change. It deploys in just minutes and offers out-of-the-box optimization, making it an ideal choice for teams seeking to simplify their email security management while ensuring comprehensive protection.
Mimecast’s Email Security CI solution provides organizations with world-class security without forcing them to choose between different protection strategies. Whether a business opts for a secure email gateway or an integrated cloud email security approach, Mimecast ensures that their email remains secure against even the most advanced threats.
The Growing Importance of Secure Email
In a world where remote work has become the norm, employees and organizations are more vulnerable to email-based cyberattacks than ever before. Business Email Compromise (BEC) and other sophisticated threats are now rampant, as cybercriminals exploit the distractions and less secure environments of remote workers. With workers logging in from various locations—be it home, hotels, or coffee shops—sometimes even using personal devices, the risk of inadvertently opening a malicious email or clicking a harmful link has never been higher.
Organizations across all sectors and regions must prioritize email security to protect their data, their reputations and bottom lines. The stakes are high, and the consequences of a successful cyberattack can be catastrophic, potentially leading to financial loss, reputational damage, and in the worst cases, job losses.
Join Our Webinar: Safeguard Your Business
It’s clear that the challenges in email security will only continue to grow. To help businesses stay ahead of these threats, Cobweb & Mimecast are jointly hosting an exclusive webinar on Wednesday, September 25th at 3 PM GST. Titled ‘Email Security 2024 – Threats & Cost-Effective Solutions,’ this webinar will delve into the most pressing cyberthreats targeting email and provide actionable insights on how to keep your business secure.
During the session, you’ll discover:
The evolving cyber threat landscape
The benefits of Mimecast’s new Email Security Cloud Integrated solution
How Mimecast CI can be deployed in under 5 minutes to defend against all email threats, including social engineering and insider risks
Why additional security layers are crucial for comprehensive protection
Attendees will also have the opportunity to access a free 30-day trial of Mimecast’s email protection and pose their most pressing security concerns to Mimecast’s experts.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to strengthen your organization’s email security. Sign up below and take the first step toward safeguarding your business.
This increase in effectiveness is in part due to the advancements in AI technology used within modern cybersecurity solutions. This allows them to stop zero-day exploits and reduce the chance of businesses falling victim to a variety of attacks.
However, as these low-effort attacks are no longer viable for cybercriminals, some have shifted their focus away from targeting technology to hacking humans. These are known as social engineering attacks. In this blog, we will explore some key social engineering tactics, find out what is at risk if your business falls victim to one of these attacks, and what steps you can take to reduce your cyber risk.
What is Social Engineering?
Social engineering attacks are a broad category of cyberattacks that include some form of psychological manipulation to trick employees into sharing confidential or sensitive information. These attacks rely on human interaction and can be conducted via email, phone call, SMS, instant messaging or in-person communication.
Whilst a well-crafted social engineering attack does take time and expertise, they are a common method for cybercriminals, as it is easier to exploit vulnerabilities within humans than in software. For example, it is much easier to trick an employee into sharing their password, rather than brute forcing a password. Did you know that an 8-character password has over six quadrillion possible combinations?
Social Engineering Tactics
The first stage of any social engineering attack is investigation. In order to craft an attack, the bad actor needs to have an understanding of the target organisation and employee. This stage is also known as open-source intelligence (OSINT) gathering, as the collection of data is gathered from publicly available sources. Some of these sources include public social media accounts, Google Maps images of office spaces, company websites and viewing EXIF data from images.
Once the bad actor has researched their target, the next stage begins, the hook. This is when the cybercriminal engages the target and starts manipulating them into forming a relationship or trusting them. A common method to develop this trust is reciprocity, whereby the bad actor gives the target some information or does a favour for them, knowing that in the future the victim will be more likely to reciprocate and share sensitive information.
Once the cybercriminal has been able to expand their foothold, they can execute the attack. This may include a phishing attack, credential theft, planting of malware or physically entering an office space. Depending on how effective the investigation and hook were, the target may not even realise they are under attack.
If this is the case, the final stage is to exit. This is where the cybercriminal removes traces of malware, covers their tracks and ends their relationship with the target individual.
To illustrate the potential fallout from a social engineering attack, and some of the common forms of attack, we have 3 recent examples.
DoL Brand Impersonation
In late 2021, email security provider INKY detected several phishing emails that were impersonating the United States Department of Labor (DoL). The phishing emails targeted stakeholders, asking them to submit a bid for a government project.
In order to ‘submit the bid’ they had to open the attached PDF and click the ‘BID’ button. This took the victim to a malicious website, with the same HTML and CSS as the real DoL website. From here, they were prompted to log in with their Microsoft 365 credentials, and upon submission, the hacker was able to harvest all the credentials, without the victim even knowing.
Source: INKY
AI-Based Vishing Targeting UK Energy Firm
In 2019, the CEO of an unnamed UK-based energy firm was contacted by who they thought was their boss, demanding a €220,000 bank transfer to a Hungarian supplier. The call did not raise suspicion for the CEO, as the person on the other end of the phone had the same accent and intonation as his German boss. However, this was not the case, as it is believed that the voice on the other end of the phone was an AI-based voice generation software.
The attack was successful, and the money was transferred to a fraudulent account. This is a prime example of a novel social engineering attack, as it was only successful as the attacker had previously researched the victim, and crafted the attack to manipulate the CEO.
Business Email Compromise Costing Facebook and Google $100 Million
A few years ago, a Lithuanian man crafted the largest social engineering attack of all time. He created a fraudulent company, pretending to be a computer manufacturer working with Google and Facebook. He then targeted specific individuals within those two companies, invoicing them for goods and services that a real manufacturer had provided.
Over 2 years, the man was able to fraudulently obtain over $100 million from Facebook and Google and was only caught 2 years after the attack.
How to Protect Your Business
It can be difficult to protect your business against complex social engineering attacks, especially as security solutions cannot supply 100% protection against many of the tactics used in these attacks.
However, email security and phishing prevention will not stop vishing attacks, in-person attacks, or phishing attacks not carried out via corporate email. In order to safeguard against these attacks, businesses need to have a strong cybersecurity education and awareness training program. This will ensure that employees are aware of common social engineer attack methods, and how to detect and report them.
Finally, it goes without saying that all businesses should have multifactor authentication enabled. This simple control can stop 99.9% of account compromise attacks and does not take long to enable. With MFA, even if an employee shares their password with a bad actor, they will not be able to log in without the additional authentication method.
How We Can Help
For businesses without security expertise, social engineering attacks can be difficult to protect against. Especially if your business does not already have a comprehensive cybersecurity awareness training program.
If you are concerned about your organisation’s security posture, contact us today and we can help ensure you’re doing everything you can to reduce your overall cyber risk.
