You have been warned. The 2025 threat landscape is set for an AI revolution, and whatever defenses you have in place will almost certainly not be good enough. Nowhere is this more true than with our email platforms at home and especially at work. “Email is the most common cyberattack vector for businesses,” a new cyber insurance report has just reinforced, “serving as the most prevalent initial entry point to launch financial fraud, ransomware, and data breach attacks.”
Despite all the cyber noise, sometimes a stat or datapoint still has the potential to stand out. And so it is with the latest report from At-Bay, lauding the benefits of email that’s more secure by default. Maybe there’s some hope after all.
At home there are checks you can do that will help you review your settings and make recommendations — Google’s account security check-up, for example. But at work it’s more complex, given that many of these settings will fall to your IT department to control. But that flexibility comes at a price. “At-Bay strongly recommends transitioning to a cloud-based email solution to mitigate security risks and ensure proactive vulnerability management.”
Nothing new here — but that transition to cloud brings the potential for increasingly game-changing defenses to be built around email and for a rethink as to how these platforms operate. We’re not there yet, but this is a step.
Gmail scores well in the new report — its security upgrades in recent years are paying off in the real world data collected from actual cyber insurance claims. “Organizations that used Google Workspace,” At-Bay says, “experienced the lowest frequency of incidents on average. Compared to the overall average, Google’s claims frequency was 54% lower.” The insurer highlights features included by default “that may not be the default setting in other email solutions.” These include “real-time scanning for phishing emails and malicious attachments, automatic security updates to protect against vulnerabilities, and integrated threat intelligence to proactively identify and respond to potential threats.”
Gmail might be the largest email provider on our planet with its claimed 2.5 billion users, but Workspace does not dominate at work the way Gmail might at home. The point being that there’s no need to play with settings to secure the platform, it’s “a comprehensive and robust security framework out of the box, without requiring additional attention to set up or configure.” Harder to run a comp in the wider world, but this enterprise data does provide some evidence this approach is working, and that the defaults are getting better.
The question is how this will evolve to cope with new AI threats heading fast in our direction. As I’ve commented before, email is a second-rate technology that has not evolved at the same pace as almost everything else. We still see too many blatant threats skip through any and all defenses into our inboxes. It’s still to easy for anyone to ping anyone, and new AI innovations make that all the more dangerous by making those threats more realistic.
We are now seeing two parallel developments. A hybrid mix of on-device and cloud screening for threats that target our phones in particular, but new AI desktops and laptops can extend this; and new safe browsing innovations that don’t only rely on centrally collated lists. It’s time for an email rethink that evolves email into a more messenger-like platform, and screens emails for threats to a level that doesn’t happen today. This is what Elon Musk has in mind with X-Mail.
Realistically, Google and Gmail are best placed to do this first across a huge user base. But in the meantime, these stats are a great ad for fully managed, cloud-based email at home and at work. Whether Gmail or one of the alternatives, if this isn’t what you’re running today then the numbers would suggest it might be time to switch.
