How to manage Email security risks and threats.
Email is still the smartest, most productive, and extensively employed means of business communication today. Companies continue to use it to interact across the globe in a matter of minutes and connect with professionals in virtually any location, opening up a world of opportunity and possibility.
The global market for email encryption is motivated by factors such as the growing application of emails for government, corporate, and personal communication between individuals business and government agencies. These have increased the demand for email encryption to protect sensitive information from any unidentified, third party sources, or hackers. The growing loss of assets, data, and information owing to cyber-attacks and threats, such as malware, viruses, and spam, has also increased the requirement of email encryption among various business organizations.
Every company requires email security, as many modern businesses expand their reach geographically and initiate communication in every direction. Employees work remotely, national and global partners are thousands of miles away. There are many cybercriminals, government spying programs, and security threats using more than just spam and viruses to exploit vulnerabilities and steal private data during long-distance communication. There is a need for organizations to have a secure email when initiating a conversation with other companies or businesses. The communication strategies should always sync up in ways that promote secure email.
Corporate Threats
The email has become a frequent target of several attacks since it is widely used to communicate, and sometimes, with untrusted organizations. The attackers can easily exploit email to gain control over an organization, access confidential information, or disrupt IT resources to external bodies. Some common threats to email systems include:
Malware
Progressively, the attackers are fully taking advantage of emails in sending a range of attacks to organizations through the use of malware that consists of viruses, Trojan horses, and spyware. When several attacks become successful, it gives the malicious entity control over workstations and servers, which can then be used to gain access to sensitive information, monitors users’ activities, as well as perform other dangerous actions.
Spamming
Spam is commonly referred to as unsolicited commercial email. It sends unwanted bulk commercial emails to companies. Such messages can easily disrupt user productivity or utilize IT resources and can be a distribution mechanism for malware. Spam also refers to the use of deceptive computer-based means to trick individuals from responding to the email-but to disclose confidential information.
Social Engineering
Apart from hacking into a system, an attacker can use email to gather sensitive information from an organization. A conventional social engineering attack is email spoofing, in which one program successfully masquerades the other by falsifying the sender’s information in the emails to hide the real ones.
Spoofing
When an email appears that it comes from a legitimate source, also in actual it comes from an imposter/ fraud. It is a copy of an email header so that it seems original or factual. It is done by spammers often, and it can be accomplished by changing the “FROM:” mail address. Email spoofing can be done in different forms, but all have the same result. Spoofing can be used in spreading viruses, malicious intentions, or it is the best trick to make the user confident and release sensitive information like password, account no. or PIN no. of account. Mostly email spammers use spoofing so that receiver can get the sender’s address or possibly respond.
Phishing
Phishing is a type of spam in which the sender enters its personal account information (banking data) to break an account and theft of data for fraud. Phishers can enhance credibility by spoofing to convince source address. We can take an example for better understanding; let’s say you get a false email and this email appears come from a legitimate company like eBay, Yahoo, government universities, etc. These messages look like they came from the source. These messages ask you to update your records by entering your Date of Birth, bank account number, and PIN, etc. These sites collect your data to steal your money, identity, etc. Keep in mind that legitimate companies or organizations already have your data, so they will never ask you to give all this kind of information. Whenever you consider any email as suspicious, then don’t reply, delete the email.
Here are the elements that should be incorporated in a reliable email security system
Reputable Antivirus Software: One of the numerous ways a virus enters your email client is through an email attachment. This is why it is essential to establish a reliable antivirus program that provides the best security possible against email viruses and worms. Preferably the application should scan all email attachments for viruses and worms.
Anti-Spyware: Hackers are famous for sending Trojans, spyware, and adware through email attachments. Your email protection should include an excellent anti-spyware program that performs regular scans and provides updates on the latest types of malware.
Spam Killer: A great spam killer will assist to cut back on the number of spam that is accepted by your email client and serves to avoid the chance of viruses accessing your email through a spam message. A spam killer can cut back on the number of phishing attacks that usually occur with spam messages.
Content Security Software: Most companies deploy content protection software to guarantee that private and sensitive content is not revealed within the business or sent outside of the company either by accident or on purpose.
Encryption System: To ensure that email communications are securely sent and received, it is necessary to deploy a public key infrastructure that can be used to encrypt and decrypt email messages that include delicate information. Public key infrastructure is costly to maintain and usually used in large organizations. If you are a smaller organization, you may want to consider a web-hosted reliable email solution.
Email Usage Policy: By implementing an email usage policy, you cut back on the amount of email traffic that happens as a result of private use by the end-user. An email usage program will help to reduce business email misuse, which provides added protection against unsolicited messages that occur as a result of using company email to engage services online or any other inappropriate use. https://www.maxfront.com/2020/04/22/how-to-prevent-zoom-bombing/
So, if you assume you have a secure plan in place, you cannot say the same for those on the other side of your communication. Data leakage has become an ever-present threat. Inside your own company, there are probably diverse applications working side by side with your email; those can also create conflicts and cause possible vulnerabilities in your security. One of the most noticeable changes sweeping the business world today is cloud technology. More organizations are moving their IT infrastructure and business applications to the cloud, which generates a whole new circle of security concerns to address.
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