Ethical Hacking News
Email security has been stuck in the antivirus era for far too long. The time has come for a shift in mindset from asking "Did the gateway block the bad thing?" to "How quickly can we see, contain, and undo the damage when an attacker inevitably gets in?"
The traditional approach of relying on Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) is no longer sufficient in today's complex threat landscape. A modern, EDR-like approach to email security is needed to detect, respond, and contain threats effectively.
Traditional email security approaches relying on Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) are no longer sufficient in today's complex threat landscape. The modern email environment requires a more sophisticated approach to detection, response, and containment. A shift in mindset is needed from asking "Did the gateway block the bad thing?" to "How quickly can we see, contain, and undo the damage when an attacker inevitably gets in?" A modern EDR-like approach to email security provides continuous visibility, fast automation, and a holistic view of risk reduction. Enabling native audit logs, centralizing telemetry, testing automated response, and evaluating dedicated platforms are crucial steps towards this new approach.
Email security has been stuck in the antivirus era for far too long. The traditional approach of relying on Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) to filter spam and commodity phishing campaigns is no longer sufficient in today's complex threat landscape. The modern email environment is a dynamic, post-delivery space that requires a more sophisticated approach to detection, response, and containment.
The conversation needs to shift from asking "Did the gateway block the bad thing?" to "How quickly can we see, contain, and undo the damage when an attacker inevitably gets in?" This mindset is similar to that of endpoint protection, where teams now rely on Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platforms for continuous visibility and fast, automated response.
In the endpoint world, the breakthrough wasn't a better blacklist. It was the realization that prevention must be paired with continuous visibility and fast, automated response. EDR platforms gave us the ability to record process trees, registry changes, and network calls. When a threat was detected, a host could be isolated and changes could be rolled back, all from a single console.
Now imagine giving email administrators the same super-powers: a rewind button for messages, OAuth scopes and file shares; the ability to freeze—or at least MFA-challenge—a mailbox the instant a risky rule is created; and a timeline that shows who read which sensitive thread after credentials were stolen. This combination of capabilities is what a modern, EDR-like approach to email security provides.
It's a simple idea: assume an attacker will eventually land in a mailbox and build the tooling needed to detect, investigate, and contain the fallout. The API-first moment that made it possible for this to happen was when cloud suites like Microsoft Graph and Google Workspace APIs exposed the necessary telemetry—mailbox audit logs, message IDs, sharing events, and permission changes—securely over OAuth.
The sensors and the actuators are already baked into the platform. We just need to connect them to a workflow that feels like EDR. As we've argued in our post, The Evolution of Email Security, this richness of telemetry is what allows security teams to move beyond the whack-a-mole of tuning filter rules.
Instead of waiting for a user to report a phish, the platform can notice an impossible-travel sign-in, see that the account immediately created five new sharing links, and automatically remediate the risk. This approach not only produces better metrics but also provides real-time visibility into email security incidents.
A Director of Security at a small or even mid-size company is often the entire security department, juggling vulnerability management, incident response, and compliance. Tool sprawl is the enemy. An EDR-like approach to email collapses several fragmented controls—SEG policy, DLP, incident response playbooks, SaaS-to-SaaS monitoring—into a single surface.
There are no MX record changes, no agents to deploy, and no dependency on users clicking a "report phish" button. More importantly, it produces metrics that matter. Instead of citing an arbitrary "catch rate," you can answer board-level questions with concrete data:
How quickly do we detect a compromised mailbox?
How much sensitive data was accessible before containment?
How many risky OAuth grants were revoked this quarter?
These numbers describe actual risk reduction, not theoretical filter efficacy.
The path forward is incremental, and each step provides a tangible security benefit. Enabling native audit logs, centralizing telemetry, testing automated response, and evaluating dedicated platforms are all crucial steps in moving towards a modern approach to email security.
Email security is stuck in the antivirus era because it's still treating the corporate mailbox as a static stream of messages instead of a dynamic, post-delivery environment. The time has come for a shift in mindset from asking "Did the gateway block the bad thing?" to "How quickly can we see, contain, and undo the damage when an attacker inevitably gets in?"
This modern approach to email security requires continuous visibility, fast automation, and a holistic view of risk reduction. By adopting this new approach, organizations can move beyond the limitations of traditional email security solutions and ensure their corporate mailboxes are properly protected against evolving threats.
Related Information:
https://www.ethicalhackingnews.com/articles/The-Evolution-of-Email-Security-A-Modern-Approach-to-Detection-Response-and-Containment-ehn.shtml
https://thehackernews.com/2025/07/email-security-is-stuck-in-antivirus.html
Published: Mon Jul 28 08:41:31 2025 by llama3.2 3B Q4_K_M
