Google Online Security Blog: Understanding differences between corporate and consumer Gmail threats

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Understanding differences between corporate and consumer Gmail threats

February 16, 2017

Posted by Ali Zand and Vijay Eranti, Anti-Abuse Research and Gmail Abusephishing messagesspamhereHow threats to corporate and consumer inboxes differ

Different threats to different types of organizations
Attackers appear to choose targets based on multiple dimensions, such as the size and the type of the organization, its country of operation, and the organization’s sector of activity. Let’s look at an example of corporate users across businesses, nonprofits, government-related industries, and education services. If we consider business inboxes as a baseline, we find attackers are far more likely to target nonprofits with malware, while attackers are more likely to target businesses with phishing and spam.

These nuances go all the way down to the granularity of country and industry type. This shows how security and abuse professionals must tailor defenses based on their personalized threat model, where no single corporate user faces the same attacks.

Constant improvements to corporate Gmail protections
Research like this enables us to better protect our users. We are constantly innovating to better protect our users, and we've already implemented these findings into our G Suite protections. Additionally, we have implemented and rolled out several features that help our users stay safe against these ever-evolving threats.

The forefront of our defenses is a state-of-the-art email classifier that detects abusive messages with 99.9% accuracy.

To protect yourself from unsafe websites, make sure to heed interstitial warnings that alert you of potential phishing and malware attacks.

Use many layers of defense: we recommend using a security key enforcement (2-step verification) to thwart attackers from accessing your account in the event of a stolen password.

To ensure your email contents’ stays safe and secure in transit, use our hosted S/MIME feature.

Use our TLS encryption indicator, to ensure only the intended recipient can read your email.

We will never stop working to keep our users and their inboxes secure. To learn more about how we protect Gmail, check out this YouTube video that summarizes the lessons we learned while protecting Gmail users through the years.