Introduction To Email Security

As this world is turning into a global village, emails remain the number one choice of communication between various companies and industries. Emails are free, convenient, and just a tap away. Sending an email is easy to learn and very convenient to teach various people.

As much as they are feasible, there is a major drawback with them as well, and that is hackers use emails to gain access to a company’s sensitive information. Hackers often send malicious links or obscure content to get hands-on confidential data and hack the entire system.

However, there is a great solution to counteract this problem as well. There are now tons of email security solutions that will help you to prevent such attempts.

What Is Email Security? 

Email security is a need of the modern century; just as the internet has become a living necessity of this era, email security has become an imperative need of all companies and organizations.

Email security lets the user know whenever a suspicious email is encountered, it helps detect malicious emails and prevents data loss.

There are now a lot of options available for email security. An organization can purchase email security services to protect all employees’ accounts and customer data.

What Are The Threats To Business Email Security? 

Cybercriminals have devised new ways and scams to trap employees and organizations. Following are the ways they use to hack a system:

Ransomware

A hacker will send a malicious link or a corrupted file, and if the recipient falls into their trap, they will be asked to give a heavy sum of money to gain back access to the confidential data.

Spam 

Spam is a very tricky way for hackers to get into your system. Normally, a suspicious email would either go into the junk mail or the spam folder.

What hackers do is send hundreds of unwanted emails together so that the email filters are unable to filter them, and they end up in the inbox. This creates a lot of email traffic and takes up a lot of space, increasing the chances of an attack.

Phishing Attack

Phishing attacks are hard to judge. Hackers will trick you into believing they are legitimate people and ask for sensitive information like login credentials, passwords, transactions, etc. Although with more awareness about email security and various security training programs now in place, the success rate of phishing emails has become quite low.

However, they still count as a threat. Businesses should continue educating their employees about such attacks and prevent data breaches.

Spear Phishing

In contrast to standard phishing attacks, spear phishing is a more targeted approach by cybercriminals. What happens is that the hacker will pretend to be someone very important from one of the company’s business partners.

They will impersonate either an assistant of the company’s owner or an important employee and target a vulnerable employee, for example, someone newly appointed to a top position. Such attacks prove devastating, as they can leak extremely crucial information.

Business Email Compromise

As the name suggests, in a business email compromise, the hackers try to gain access to the company’s official email address or email accounts . All important communications take place via the official email address. Therefore, they try to get their hands on its password or ownership.

They will misuse this email address and trick the customers into sharing their information and sending in money via fake invoices.

Internal Threats

An under-informed employee is a threat to the system. Newly appointed employees with little or no information about email security features are vulnerable to attacks. A simple click on a malicious email can result in catastrophic results.

Thus, it is the responsibility of the company to conduct proper security awareness training programs regularly and keep all the employees in check.

What Are The Features Of Email Security? 

To prevent such attacks and to make email communication safer, email security service providers have come up with numerous email security solutions, such as:

Spam Filter

Every organization or even an individual with two or three accounts will receive a number of marketing emails in a single day. Such emails usually contain promotional content, which could be more useful to read. The problem this creates is that important emails from higher authorities or other businesses need to be noticed.

Moreover, hackers take advantage of this situation. They cleverly mix their phishing emails into one of these promotional emails.

An employee might get tricked into opening this email and clicking on the malicious link present inside. This can result in sensitive data getting breached and misused.

A solution to this very common problem is the installation of spam filters. Spam filters will screen out all such emails and put them in a separate spam folder. In this way, the important emails will not get mixed, and all the spam emails will be out of the way.

Another important feature of spam filters is that you can choose the time interval after which the spam folder will get empty automatically. This means you do not even have to go and delete the emails yourself.

Antivirus Protection

A spam filter is designed to sieve spam mail and put it in the spam folder for a certain period of time. This feature is important. However, what’s more important is the installation of an antivirus program.

An antivirus program will scan not only suspicious malware but also block such emails from coming in altogether. A spam email present in the spam folder is still like a ticking time bomb. A user mistakenly opening it and clinking on the link can bring a dreaded virus to the system or even cause a leak of sensitive information.

There are a number of antivirus programs out there that can be downloaded and installed easily in no time. A company should invest in such trustworthy softwares, buy a package of a yearly subscription and improve their email security.

Image And Content Control

Cybercriminals not only hack systems by sending fraudulent messages or harmful links but can also corrupt the system by sending malicious software via images.

Therefore, email security solutions should have the services of providing protection by scanning incoming images as well. Such images, if downloaded, can disrupt the system and produce catastrophic results.

Data Encryption

The email content is vulnerable to attack during the sending process whenever you send an email to someone. This is because the content is sent in an open format, giving the hackers the opportunity to get their hands on the sensitive data. Spam filters or even antivirus programs cannot provide protection against such open content.

The type of email security required for such a problem is the encryption of data. Data encryption is a breakthrough in the field of email security solutions. It ensures that all the content is encrypted and completely secure, thus providing no opportunity for hackers.

The advanced features of this email security solution encrypt the recipient’s details and email messages. Data encryption provides big organizations with the maximum amount of protection required for the much-needed security of their sensitive data. This feature is a must-have and should be employed by all companies.

Conclusion

Emails continue to be the major mode of communication between various industries and companies. There are hundreds of email accounts being used every day. However, the most imperative role is that of email security features.

There are various types of email security solutions, like spam filters, data encryption, email encryption, image control, etc., that ensure all kinds of cyber-attacks are avoided.

Although the number of email threats has reduced after the installation of these types of email security, phishing campaigns are still on the rise. There it is important for all companies to remain vigilant and prevent phishing attempts.