What is email security? What are email security solutions and services? What are the best practices to assure email security In this blog, we will answer the questions above?
1- What is Email Security?
Email security is the use of various technologies or policies to protect mailboxes against cyber threats. In today’s digital world, many organizations are using more of a cloud or hybrid email platform and cloud email security is becoming more and more important. Keepnet’s Email Security products provide multi-layered protection.
2- Email Security Definition
Email security includes a variety of policies, procedures, and techniques to protect email accounts and email content from unauthorized access. Email security solutions are often used to stop malware, spam, and phishing attacks. Attackers often use deceptive messages to persuade victims to provide sensitive information, open attachments, or click links that allow them to install malware on their devices. Email is the most important entry point to obtain valuable company data in the organization.
3- How Secure are Email Services?
Email service platforms are open and accessible. It allows employees in institutions to communicate with each other and with people in other institutions. However, email is by no means a secure method of communication. Cyber attackers view email as the most important tool to attempt to make a profit. Attackers try to explain email security through spam campaigns, malware and phishing attacks, and various spear-phishing tactics. Because most organizations operate over email, attackers target email to steal sensitive information.
Many cybersecurity experts declare in various reports that phishing emails, malware, ransomware, BEC attacks and other threats are the most important risks. Tools that monitor data protection and secure outbound traffic are also important. In general, there are four main elements that can be compromised:
- Email body
- Email attachments
- URLs found in the email
- Sender’s email address
Because email is so critical in today’s business world, organizations must build the right policies on how to protect this flow of information. One of the first email security policies most organizations established was often to control the content of outgoing and incoming emails from email servers.
It is important to understand what is in the email in order to take the right action. Once this is done the basic policies, institutions can implement a variety of security policies on emails.
Email security policies are generally to remove malicious content from emails, analyze suspicious email content in detail, and use the right tools for these actions. These policies should also include the use of cyber threat sharing or threat intelligence tools. Thus, the email vulnerabilities that may arise can be detected in advance.
When email security incidents are detected, the solution should specify in advance how the organization can take action on the attack. For this, incident response tools can be utilized.
6. What Are the Best Email Security Practices?
Using an automated email encryption tool as a practice is an important thing to consider. Such products are able to analyze all outgoing email traffic to determine whether the sent content is sensitive information, and sensitive-detected emails are encrypted before being sent to the target user by email. The attackers will not view the encrypted email content at this stage even if they have somehow compromised.
Training employees on the correct and safe use of email and providing them with the necessary means to know which email is malicious or non-malicious is also an important best practice for email security.
When users receive a malicious email that bypassing through the secure email gateway, they will be responsible to prevent these attacks from happening as the last line of defense. They will also be successful in preventing many attacks if they know where to look first. Cybersecurity training helps employees detect and report such malicious emails.
Cyber threat intelligence has an important place among email security best practices. With this tool, possible threats are eliminated in advance.
7- Email Security Best Practices List
Your employees are your biggest line of defense against phishing attacks, especially advanced spear-phishing attempts. Employees who can directly detect a phishing attempt can stop even the most important email attacks.
Use multi-factor authentication
If a corporate email account login and password is stolen, multi-factor authentication will stop an attacker from gaining access to the account.
Reporting, analyzing, quarantining, or eliminating an attack are very important processes. Get automated tools that can do all of this.
See potential data leaks on the Darkweb and Deepweb, and stay one step ahead of potential attacks that could target your organization.
Consider an integrated cybersecurity solution
Integration of email security with wider security tools, check if advanced malware or emails in an environment are reaching specific users or their inboxes.
By simulating real attacks, attack your email inbox with various attack variants and test yourself. Tools such as Email Threat Simulator can reveal how vulnerable email is to risks and threats.
8- Which Email Security Tools Should I Use?
Prepare your users against cyber attacks using information security training. Educate users with various awareness videos, cartoons, presentations, Animations, Interactive content, HTML5 Tutorials, and other extra security training content.
Try to experience phishing attacks in a safe environment with the latest attack examples. Test your users with various phishing themes and equip your institution against attacks!
Test whether the email service you use is sufficient against current attacks. Use real attacks to find out if these attacks are blocked by anti-spam or Sandbox technologies.
Using intelligence data, find out if there are any leaks that could endanger your organization and take necessary steps beforehand against possible attacks.
Perform processes such as accurately reporting suspicious emails, analyzing them, scanning and detecting different variants within the organization, and then quarantine or deletion.
Keepnet free phishing simulator tool helps businesses train their employees to detect phishing attacks and report them to users’ inboxes by bypassing technological measures.
“This post is originally published at www.keepnetlabs.com”
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