From ALTA ONE, The Top 3 Peer Insights (We Took Notes for You)
The American Land Title Association conference in San Diego (ALTA ONE) was quite an event – on beautiful Coronado Beach, white sand, and (unfortunately) more fog and rain than most expected for California-in-drought. We at RPost had a team of cybersecurity experts on site to visit with customers. Here is what we found was top of mind for most.
Top 3 Real Estate, Title, Settlement Services Tech Insights:
- “There are likely more compromised email accounts today in the real estate sector as a whole, than secure ones,” remarked the president of one of the largest title insurance companies. Sure, many of the larger organizations may feel confident that their systems are secure, however, the nature of the business requires them to work with transaction participants — title agencies, mortgage brokers, escrow firms, real estate agents, and home buyers – who don’t have the big tech IT security resources. The Secret Service reports that in the United States, a home buyer mis-wires funds to cybercriminals every 37 seconds with an average loss of $150,000. Clearly, these business email compromise (tricky impostor email lure) induced wire frauds are today the industry’s greatest source of financial loss. Considering this, it’s no wonder every conference participant exposed to the new RMail Email Eavesdropping™ alerts remarked, “why would we not have this enabled for all our outbound email?” Having advance detection techniques to visually see whose email account is currently being eavesdropped on by cybercriminals was, according to conference goers, a seemingly must-have. These Email Eavesdropping™ alerts show you in real-time which email accounts are being eavesdropped on, along with all the metadata related to the eavesdropping packaged nicely for further quick response. And, this service can be enabled on any outbound email from any device without need for any plugins. It rides along with RMail email encryption so you can be privacy compliant and cybersecure. (Read more about RMail’s new PRE-Crime™ intelligence). [Enabling this RMail outbound email security does not impact one’s choice for inbound email security.]
- Cybercriminals are great posers – not the kind hanging around Hollywood nightspots – but more mundane. They are creating profiles – lookalike domains and email content that is factually accurate other than one letter off in the email domain, and with the right bank but wrong bank account number in payment instructions. These cybercriminals are posing as lawyers, escrow agents, real estate agents and others — down to the headshot in the email and the call back numbers to check-in by phone. Agents and buyers are being lured by cleverly constructed lookalike domains (cybercriminal trickery) and pre-populated authentic email threads, causing a major financial mis-wire risk. Inbound gateways stamping markings on most inbound email makes one numb to the warning. Conference goers were exasperated, expressing that there must be a better way to identify this cybercriminal trickery; and then they saw there was. With RMail’s Lookalike Domain™ alerts that run inside Microsoft Outlook, they could see how these first-of-a-kind snippets of alerts in real time, in the moment-of-sending, check the domain of each recipient and alert if the domain appears to be suspiciously new or suspiciously configured to hijack reply email. These alerts protect against both human error and these tricky cybercriminal lures. (Read more).
- Companies in the sector are burdened with the need to engage in ongoing security awareness training to minimize risk of being tricked by cybercriminals into mis-wiring funds (aka wire fraud). However, they are surrounded by challenges in how to engage is effective ongoing training. What conference goers admired about the design of RMail for Outlook with its AI “Recommends” module is that it solves this human training problem as, in-the-moment of sending, after the send button is clicked, before the send, it presents the sender with recommendations as to whether, when, and which messages might be better sent encrypted, whether the email address they are sending to might not be legitimate, and more. By contrast, automated inbound gateway solutions are designed to notify administrators and not users, and therefore are not effective in sensitizing users to the needs to treat certain email differently. [Remember, with RMail, one can maintain the security of their current inbound security gateway servers; RMail adds additional layers of in-the-inbox security automation].
At RPost, we’re here for you. In good economic times, we can help you accelerate your business and with better security. In challenging times, we can help you focus inward and cut costs while not skimping on technology service functionality or security. Let us know if you would like RPost industry technology experts to set you up with any trial accounts or demos. Or, get started here, now!
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