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Like any other part of your business, your emails are open to being a target of cyberattacks, which means that they need to be secured as well. From social engineering attacks to malicious attachments, there are a host of different ways that emails can be used as an attack vector for malicious personnel to gain access to your business.
While phishing and other social engineering threats are well-documented, it can be easy to forget about the attacks that go beyond phishing. From spoofing and impersonation to even just attachment viruses, emails are a potent method of attacking a business. But there are a number of tools that can help in this regard.
In this article, we’re going to go over the ins and outs of email security, so you know everything you need to know about securing your inbox and organisation, and ultimately keeping safe from attackers.
The threat landscape for emails has evolved massively, as technology has advanced. Phishing is no longer the only threat that you need to look out for, as there’s a ton of different threats lurking around every corner.
After all, an email can be unassuming to most, but even a simple malicious attachment such as an infected text file can wreak havoc if not detected properly. With this, it’s vital to make sure that nothing is left aside when it comes to email security, as even a small vulnerability can leave a massive hole for attackers to exploit.
With so many different aspects, though, it can be overwhelming to make sure you’ve got everything covered. That’s why it’s vital to make sure that you’re aware of the core pillars of advanced email security, to make sure that your business is properly protected and won’t fall victim to one of these attacks, and so you know exactly how to protect yourself.
Attachment and URL protection will ensure that everything that comes into your system is safe and scanned, meaning that you don’t have to worry about a virus finding its way into your business through a rogue attachment, or a bad link that could take advantage of an exploit in your systems.
Essentially, these systems scan every attachment and url in a sandbox, meaning that they can be analysed safely for malicious activity, and then quarantined if they are going to be unsafe for your environment. By making sure that you’ve got a system in place to sandbox attachments and URLs, you can ensure that nothing slips through.
Impersonation detection and threat actor profiling both help in identifying either an attacker and their motive, or an attacker impersonating a higher-up in your business.
This means that you can easily ensure that you’re fully aware of everything happening within your business, as well as protecting yourself against CEO fraud and other kinds of advanced social engineering attacks that might try to take advantage of emails to impersonate others.
The best tool for impersonation detection and threat actor profiling is training, as it’ll help keep your business and everyone within informed about the dangers they might face and potential signs of an attack.
Continuity is vital in keeping your business afloat in the event of an outage, as well as ensuring that key communication lines don’t go down in a time of need. Outages can happen anytime, either from a failure somewhere along the line, or from a cyberattack.
Outages can causae a lot of damage to your business, so making sure you have a continuity and resilience plan in place to ensure that communications and services are upheld are vital. There are services for this, that use a relay to ensure continuity and let you switch to a webmail platform temporarily in the event of an outage.
In the event of an incident, ensuring that your data is safe is key to making sure your business comes out unscathed. This means having a solid data loss protection strategy involved, to make sure that your data doesn’t become compromised or destroyed in the process.
DLP policies are also important in this, as they allow you to classify data and create rules to ensure data loss protection — by, for example, blocking emails with text within a DLP policy, or any confidential files that an employee might attempt to send.
Emailing archive is vital for organisation, and creating a tamper-proof record of email communication throughout your business. This is vital in the case of discovery in a legal process, or even just for regulatory compliance purposes.
Utilising email tools such as tagging, classification, search, and reporting will ensure that you have a solid archive available to help you navigate your archive with ease.
Making sure that possible threats and malicious activities are reported is vital, as it’ll ensure that you can keep a log of events and possible attacks. This is beneficial to try to proactively stop attackers, as well as ensuring that you’re aware of possible repeated targets or patterns.
You can use this data to create actionable intelligence points, meaning that you can take steps to be able to protect yourself and your employees.
Your email security should be your top priority for cybersecurity. After all, making sure that you don’t leave yourself vulnerable in one of the most important attack vectors of the modern world is vital. Even just leaving one of these pillars unattended could lead to catastrophe in the long run.
Partnering with a Managed Service Provider will help you ensure that you’ve always got a helping hand along the way, that’ll make sure you stay protected around the clock. Email security can be complex and confusing, but we’ll help simplify it again.
Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.