Email facility is an integral part of every business. It is impossible to run your business without using emails. Your company's internal and external communication and data exchange is done largely by email. Sensitive, confidential information is exchanged through billions of emails every day across the world. It is highly imperative, therefore to protect and secure your email system. Otherwise it could lead to business catastrophe. Here are few tips for companies to ensure security of their emails.
- Have a multiple security system: Most of the companies use only one security scanning system for their emails. Always have a strategy to have more than one security system. Relying on only one system could be unsafe as not always any single system is immune to all kinds of attacks. Just one vulnerability in the security system will cause your email system to crash or exposed to data theft. Additional layer of a security will prevent this kind of attack.
- Configure your email server: Your company should correctly configure email by setting up DMARC ( Domain Based Message Authentication). This protocol checks incoming mails for ensuring messages are legitimate. If senders impersonate as a company person, this will be warded off by DMARC.
- Encrypt Emails: Encryption of mails will protect your company in case someone manages to steal your email data. An encrypted mail cannot be deciphered by unauthorized person. For example, you can use TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol to encrypt emails. It sets up a secure channel to communicate so that only sender and receiver can access the email contents.
- Guard against spoofing attacks: Hackers often assume a false identity and send you email to steal data or money or spread malware. Beware ! This has to be warded off through wisdom. For example, if the boss is out of town, and a spoof attacker sends email to his colleagues as the boss being in a dire situation and needs money. The attacker's mail will persuade the colleague to immediately transfer money to the boss. This panic creating situation easily tricks innocent employees in sending money or sensitive information to the attacker.
- Filter Email: Use spam filters, firewalls and detection engines to protect spurious emails, By routing email through a gateway, you can enable deep inspection of email. A cloud platform keeps security patches up to date. When an email gateway identifies an attachment as potentially harmful, the platform can place the attachment in a sandbox environment to test how it behaves.
- Avoid phishing attacks: Phishing is a cyber-crime in which a target is contacted by email, telephone or text message by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, banking and credit card details, and passwords. Train your employees periodically to be cautious about such emails. An essential part of the training is learning not to open attachments unless you are expecting one. If you didn't expect an attachment, confirm with the senders that they intended to send it.
The above tips are generic. Information Security is a vast area and therefore regularly update yourself with latest technologies and knowledge so that you have an up to date security system for your organization in all areas.
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