Business Email Compromise or Email Account Compromise (BEC/EAC) is a major cause of damages for companies and organisations worldwide. The crux of the matter is that an outsider poses as an employee or trusted relation via a seemingly authentic email message, in order to, for example, secure an unwarranted payment or other damaging action.
This form of cybercrime has steadily risen in recent years and now ranks 1st among cybersecurity threats, with an estimated annual global damage of $20 billion. This amounts to almost half of all damage caused by cybercrime.
Many organisations do not know that with the deployment of a digital email signature, an important first line of defence against these BEC/EAC attacks is set up. The Secure/MIME certificate required for this comes from the same family as the SSL/TLS certificate that protects all websites worldwide. The S/MIME certificate has existed since 1998 but has never been widely accepted as the ‘secure’ method of email because its installation and management was a drama for IT departments.
With the introduction two years ago of the Secure Email Service, which KeyTalk delivers worldwide together with partners GlobalSign, DigiCert and DigiCert QuoVadis, that hurdle for large-scale implementation has been taken away. The service makes the deployment, installation, configuration and management of S/MIME certificates simple and quick.
Since then, larger organisations have increasingly opted for digital signing using the KeyTalk Secure Email Service, but have done so in-house. S/MIME certificates are not only used for digital signing but can also be used for full end-to-end encryption of messages and the crypto key pairs used for this must not be held by third parties.
However, many small to medium-sized organisations do not have the capacity or knowledge to do this in-house, which is why, starting next week, we will be offering this Secure Email Service in the cloud so that it can also be purchased completely ‘as-a-Service’.
Since this month KeyTalk has signed a global partner agreement with DigiCert, the largest digital certificate authority (CA) in the world, which will offer this Secure Email Service as SaaS through its global partner network as THE first line of defence against Business Email Compromise (BEC/EAC). With our existing global partner GlobalSign and with Europe’s leading DigiCert QuoVadis, there is always a good choice of certificate when purchasing the service and this choice does not affect the price.
You can easily sign up for the service via the KeyTalk website or that of one of our partners. You indicate for how many employees you want a digital e-mail signature and fill in your organisation and contact details.
Based on this, you will immediately receive a quotation. If you sign for it, one of the certificate partners selected by you will start the organisation validation process. This process takes 1-3 days depending on the chosen partner and the urgency. You will then receive a digitally signed email message from the service to distribute to employees with an explanation, a ‘link’ for downloading and installing the ‘Secure Email Service’ app and the organisation-specific configuration of the app.
The KeyTalk app automatically takes care of the entire process of retrieving the certificate from the chosen CA, installation and configuration of the email client (such as Outlook) and then the management. Starting the app, filling in the email address and entering the one-time-password sent is possible within about 1 minute.
And that is all! The result is a configured digital signature as proof of identity in your Outlook, Outlook 365 or Apple Mail application, where every outgoing e-mail is by default digitally signed with your automatically installed digital e-mail certificate from GlobalSign, DigiCert or DigiCert QuoVadis. By doing so, you directly contribute to the first line of protection against BEC/EAC attacks on your organisation.
For any questions about this, please contact sales@keytalk.com directly.
More information can also be found on the Safe E-Mail Service page of our website.
The KeyTalk Team
