Having the proper security in-place to protect your organization from malicious email attacks is important. However, they don’t catch everything. Meaning, they need to be able to provided the current malicious attacks in order to prevent them intruding further. That leaves it up to the IT professionals as the true defenders from attacks. Nowadays, phishing email designs are deceiving. It becomes a skill to be able to distinguish what is fake and what is legitimate. The question is, what benefit do you get with this skill? Here are some reasons why

Scam prevention

One of the main why this skill comes into play. Attackers try to find deceiving ways to get you to react to the email that’s malicious. A specific tactic called spoofing uses impersonation to bypass security and be granted the access they’ve desired. With reading email headers, you can piece together information of where the sender could be located. This could help distinguish if the sender’s legitimacy.

Infrastructure delay

Sometimes users notice that emails are not sending or receiving in a delay. Email headers, along with an online analyzer tool, could provide data to show the duration of each server hop throughout its journey. From there, you can analyze if filtering or other variables are contributing to this delay that occurs.

Routing

Along with duration, it’s also good to know what path the emails are going on. You might be able to adjust this process with the information the headers provide.