Human Firewall a critical new line of defense

More than 200 people from a diverse range or organisations attended the Human Firewall event hosted by Mimecast. The aim of the event was to inform attendees about the security risk advanced spear phishing attacks posed to their organisations and to explain how to protect themselves by combining employee education and technology.

"This event was an opportunity for us to bring together customers, partners, other organisations and the media to discuss the hot topic of spear phishing. Spear phishing is rapidly becoming the cybercriminal's attack method of choice and is a major threat to data security of businesses and their employees globally. This kind of attack uses email to take advantage of employees and can bypass traditional protections like firewalls and virus scanning. This event gave us the opportunity to educate South Africans on the importance of partnering effective email security technology with employee education to turn them into a human firewall - a critical new line of defense," explains Brandon Bekker, MD of Mimecast South Africa.

Email spear phishing attacks are becoming more and more prevalent and can lead to significant breaches in organisational systems. Before, organisations and their networks were the target of hackers and cybercriminals, but as corporate IT systems became better protected the attack shifted to employees.