What is email security?
Secure email: A term to describe various procedures and techniques to protect email accounts, content, and communications against unauthorized access, loss, or compromise. Email is often used to spread malware, spam, and phishing attacks. Attackers use scams to lure recipients to give up sensitive information, open attachments, or click hyperlinks that install malware on the victim's machine.
Email is also a common entry point for attackers looking to gain a foothold in an enterprise network and obtain valuable corporate data, and email encryption involves encrypting or masking the content of email messages to protect potentially sensitive information from being read by anyone other than the intended recipients. Email encryption often includes authentication.
How secure is email
Email is designed to be as open and accessible as possible. It allows people in organizations to communicate with each other and with people in other organizations. But the problem is that email is not secure, as this allows attackers to use email as a way to create problems trying to profit, whether, through spam campaigns, malware and phishing attacks, complex targeted attacks, or business email hacks (BEC), attackers are trying to take advantage of From a lack of email security to carry out their actions.
Since most organizations rely on email to do business, attackers exploit email in an attempt to steal sensitive information.
Since email is an open format, it can be intercepted by anyone, causing email security concerns. This has also become a problem as organizations have begun to send confidential or sensitive information via email. An attacker can easily read the contents of the email by intercepting it. But over the years, organizations have increased email security measures to make it more difficult for attackers to obtain sensitive or confidential information.
Email Security Policies
Since email is so important in today's business world, organizations have created policies on how to handle this flow of information. One of the first policies most organizations set is to display the contents of email messages flowing through their email servers. It is important that you understand what is in the entire email in order to act appropriately. After these baseline policies are in place, an organization can enact different security policies on these email messages.
These email security policies can be as simple as removing all executable content from email messages to more in-depth actions, such as sending suspicious content to a sandbox for detailed analysis. If security incidents are detected through these policies, the organization needs actionable intelligence about the scope of the attack.
This will help determine the damage the attack may have caused. Once an organization has visibility into all emails sent, it can enforce email encryption policies to prevent sensitive email information from falling into the wrong hands.
Email Security Best Practices
One of the first best practices that organizations should implement is to implement a secure email gateway. The email gateway checks and processes all incoming and outgoing emails and makes sure that threats are not allowed in. As attacks become increasingly sophisticated, standard security measures, such as blocking known corrupted file attachments, are no longer effective. A better solution is to deploy a secure email portal that uses a layered approach.
It is also important to deploy an automatic email encryption solution as a best practice. This solution should be able to analyze all outgoing email traffic to determine if the material is sensitive. If the content is sensitive, it must be encrypted before it is emailed to the intended recipient. This will prevent attackers from viewing your emails, even if they intercept them.
Training employees in the proper use of email and knowing what is good and bad email is also an important best practice for email security. Users may receive a malicious email that slips through a secure email portal, so it is important that they understand what they are looking for. They are often subjected to phishing attacks, which bear telltale signs. Training helps employees detect and report these types of emails.
How can emails be hacked?
While many cybersecurity professionals are familiar with common email security threats like phishing, ransomware, business email hacking, and other incoming threats, it is also important to consider protecting data and securing outbound traffic.
There are four main components of an email message that can be hacked or tampered with:
- Email text.
- Email attachments.
- The addresses (URLs) are contained in the email.
- The sender's email address.
Email Security Best Practices
1. Perform phishing exercises regularly
Employees are the company's best defense against phishing, especially more personalized phishing attempts. Employees who can learn to recognize a phishing attempt can completely stop the first source of endpoint hacking.
2. Use multi-factor authentication
If your corporate email account credentials are successfully stolen, multi-factor authentication can prevent an attacker from gaining access to the account and wreaking havoc.
3. Isolate messages
The Message Quarantine function is useful for preserving the message while the file attachment is being analyzed before either editing the message to the recipient, removing the malicious attachment, or removing the message completely. Email processing helps if a malicious file is detected after it has been delivered to the recipient. It allows returning and isolating the message with a malicious attachment from inside a mailbox.
4. Harnessing threat information
The Structured Threat Information (STIX) expression is now commonly used by email security products, which is useful if an organization wants to use a vertically focused threat feed that overrides the product's native threat intelligence.
5. Think of an integrated solution for cybersecurity
Integrating email security with broader security portfolios is also becoming popular for determining whether malware or advanced messages in an environment have been delivered to specific users or inboxes.
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