Your organization security is at substantial risk if you have not implemented email security policy. Daily we all receive emails which contains malware, Trojans or malicious website links for the purpose of data theft or to intrude into the organization and spam emails number is also very high. At times firewalls are not effective to control inbound email threats, phishing emails, spear phishing emails and it becomes difficult to prevent sensitive and secure information from going out into the hands of cyber criminals. Therefore Email Security is of utmost importance and each organization must adopt latest email security as safeguard.
As per research, more than 90% of cyber-attacks starts with emails. Because we don’t use spam email filters therefore so large number of man hours go waste into email filtering, deleting spam emails. Deletion of spam emails may seem two minutes task but look at bigger picture and what if any spam email is left in the folder and attached document is opened by someone in mistake. A slight mistake can lead to very heavy losses.
Some organizations uses standard spam filters wherein IT administrator has to define customized spam parameters. There are spam email filters that provides multiple layers of email protection to stop phishing emails, spam emails, DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, viruses and malware etc.
If cyber-attacks are not stopped from time to time, then it can cause severe consequences resulting into compromising computers and other devices, data loss, reputation loss and penalty also.
Nature of email attack is highly sophisticated because cyber criminals use social engineering, impersonation techniques to target the people or organization. They draft emails in such a way that people feel that email has come from their known person or organization. Even at times cyber criminals impersonates very cleverly and send emails by creating fake email ids on the name of government department like income tax, service tax etc. These type of email attacks are called as social engineering attacks and their success rate is very high and these social engineering attacks are very difficult to detect.
Email Security- Do and Don’t
- Educate and Train your employees because cyber criminals target them by sending phishing emails, spam emails etc. and they are best people to protect the organization.
- Clean Email inbox, drafts, archives, email trash folders time to time.
- Beware of malware attachments, malicious links in the emails. Scan those with licensed antivirus program.
- Use strong passwords and separate passwords for different accounts having alpha numeric combination, though passwords can be stolen from your service provider or from your own devices.
- To safeguard your password, use Two-factor authentication (Define and link) for all email accounts or at least on all important email ids to safeguard your data. If cyber criminals have access to your password they will not be able to use because of two way authentication.
- Mimecast can be implemented as a safeguard.
- Don’t give your email address on the websites as it can easily be spammed.