The Importance of Email Security
Today’s business world heavily relies on emails as a form of communication. And thus, an email security solution is paramount to cybersecurity for the safety and privacy of our private and corporate information.
Email security refers to the methods and strategies used to safeguard email accounts, information, and communication from unwanted access, loss, or compromise. As we continue using email as our choice of communication, it is actively used to carry out social engineering attacks like phishing, among others.
Phishing attacks via emails are carried out by luring the user into trusting to reveal sensitive data, open malware-infected attachments, or guide them to a malicious website. Securing our emails reduces that risk and keeps our systems and information safe.
Risks Associated with Malicious Emails
In this section, we’ll discuss the email security risks and how to reduce them. Email is a popular attack vector among attackers seeking banking information or holding information for ransom.
So, are emails secure? This totally depends on the security measure you follow.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is quite common these days as attackers are easily able to steal any corporate email account’s credentials. So, let us know more about the risks associated with emails.
1. Chain Mail
A chain mail is all about luring the receiver to spread the copies of that email to other users as well. The attacker here usually creates a fear among users that if they don’t spread that email, they might lose something. And thus places malware in your system and collects your contacts as well.
2. Phishing
Phishing is a sort of data breach malware attack in which the attacker sends a misleading email to the recipient in order to manipulate them into providing access to their private data, such as credit card numbers, among other things. Phishing or spear phishing is a sort of social engineering assault or identity theft that includes malware, code injection, and network attacks.
3. Spoofing
Spoofing attack includes posing as a known authority to someone to gain private information such as banking details or place malware in the user’s system.
4. Misconfigured Email
If your organization uses a misconfigured email server, this means potentially harmful emails can be delivered to you without authentication. This might have serious consequences for your organization.
A misconfigured email service, for example, might enable fraudsters to log in to your email account without authentication and send random harmful emails to your staff and customers.
Business Email Protection Best Practices
So, of course, passing business emails via servers (a secure email gateway) is absolutely critical to email security across the organization. Email security rules might include basics such as deleting all executable information from emails. They might also include steps such as forwarding questionable content to a sandboxing tool for a comprehensive investigation.
1. Email Encryption
Another important email security technique includes an automated email encryption solution. This is also called end-to-end encryption. This means that the email message sent is encrypted by the sender and can only be decrypted by the recipient.
2. Training Employees
Also, business email protection practices should also include employee training to identify phishing attacks and tell if the email is malicious. By training employees, the organization effectively empowers them to protect themselves and also warn against social engineering attacks.
3. Multifactor Authentication
Traditional filtering techniques used by Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) are useless against today’s targeted, sophisticated, and advanced technical threats.
As a result, a company should seek out a better cloud email security solution that adds layers of intuitive, real-time protection to the baseline security provided by Office 365. Here comes multifactor authentication for an added layer of protection.
4. Backup
As attackers get more sophisticated in their attacks, oftentimes, even an effective email security policy is not enough to protect the emails from a potential attack. So, the organization should ensure that they have a strong and protected backup of all important data if some of it gets corrupt.
Some Email Security Tools
The two most important tools an organization needs to protect itself from email threats and email social engineering attacks are the best email security policy, including a secure email gateway and an email encryption solution.
1. Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
It is a device or software used to monitor email to block unauthorized or unwanted emails and allow only authorized and good ones. It analyzes and inspects every incoming and outgoing email from the organization.
2. Email Encryption Solution
This increases privacy in information communicated via emails. The communication is transformed from understandable plain text into jumbled ciphertext. Only the receiver who has the private key corresponding to the public key used to encrypt the message can read it.
Some Email Security Protocols
Any organization must employ additional steps to keep hackers and attackers at bay from attacking their employees. These protocols must keep a check on inbound and outbound email traffic. Let’s take a look at some:
1. Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
SPF is essentially used to authenticate emails sent to an organization. With this technique, an organization can prevent impersonators from sending emails on its behalf.
2. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIF)
With this email authentication technique, you can effectively detect forged sender addresses in emails. It uses public-key cryptography for the same.
3. Domain-based Message Authentication (DMARC)
DMARC protects from email spoofing by authenticating using both SPF and DKIM. This is the most effective method of email authentication currently among the three, as it may already be obvious.
Final Thoughts
Email security is absolutely critical in today’s corporate world. Email messages must be encrypted, and the firms must place email security solutions in place to protect email accounts and their sensitive information that the attackers might use to place malicious malware into the user’s system or to steal sensitive information.
Data protection can avoid email threats, phishing attempts, or attackers gaining access to your system. The more the security policies, the merrier. These policies include email encryption, two-factor authentication, or a secure gateway to enhance security.
