As businesses depend more on communicating online, hackers also see more opportunities in exploiting vulnerabilities in the business email accounts to launch different types of phishing attacks. These attacks are inflicting heavy financial losses and causing a serious dent in the reputation of the companies.
The high success rate of Business Email Compromise (BEC) and the heavy financial gains associated with it makes it most lucrative for hackers, encouraging them to develop new and complex techniques that are much more coordinated and organized than before.
According to the seventh annual State of the Phish report, 75% of organizations suffered some phishing attack in 2020. Some 35% faced spear-phishing attacks, and 65% faced BEC attacks. Hence, it becomes almost essential to protect all your email communications and organization from cyber threats.
To protect and harden your email security, you must pay attention to the security of the crucial data exchanged between the user web browser and the webserver with the help of SSL Certificate security. You can buy a reliable, cost-effective, cheap RapidSSL or Comodo positivessl for your website, which encrypts all the data in transit between the web server and the user web browser.
It keeps all your sensitive data protected from attacks like Man-in-the-middle. Furthermore, SSL Certificate shifts the protocol of the website to secure HTTPS and thus helps win user trust.
Additionally, organizations should build a secure email system and be vigilant not to use poor email security practices. So, we summarise here a few topmost security practices to secure business email for everyone’s benefit.
Adopt A Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
(Source: https://cofense.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/How-SEGs-Work.png )
A Secure Email Gateway(SEG) is a dedicated email security defense system that shields the organization’s server from malicious emails, including viruses, spam, DDOS attacks, phishing attacks, etc., by blocking them down.
At the same time, it keeps a constant check on the outgoing emails for any harmful content that could result in any compliance irregularities or data loss. Some very useful and value-added functions performed by SEG are,
In many instances of email client failure, SEG maintains business continuity by ensuring email access. Email encryption for outbound emails is an excellent security feature that adds to the email security defense.
In addition, features like email archiving ensure there is no violation of data compliance laws. SEG also implements granular controls for admins to manage access to various IT assets and applications used within an organization, e.g., by just clicking once, you can have a complete overview of the access scene of the entire organization with a quick view; of ‘who can access what.’
Implement Post Delivery Protection(PDP)
With SEGs forming part of a pre-delivery-protection for secure business email, spear-phishing attacks, and business email compromise(BEC), they still can get past the email security defense. To tackle such attacks, implementing a post-delivery protection(PDP) system becomes most imperative for organizations.
PDP platforms essentially work by automatically detecting and mitigating emails carrying malicious codes that make their way into the organization’s email server. These platforms use advanced technologies like machine learning to continuously scan the email content for protection against cyber threats like BEC or spear-phishing attacks. Sandboxing, malware detectors, antivirus software also form a part of these PDPs.
Some key features included in PDP platforms are automatic detection and deletion of spotted threats and warnings issued to users to detect any suspicious emails. It also automatically puts email quarantines based on AI and machine learning. PDP systems also provide granular controls for admins.
Pay Attention To Cybersecurity Awareness Seminars
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Organize regular cybersecurity seminars for your employees to create awareness regarding new business email threats and how to handle them, incorporating certain best security practices to secure business email. This training is crucial for any organization’s employees as they are the ones who will defend against any potential data breach attacks that manage to break through the email security defense platforms.
Well-rounded security awareness and training program must include all levels of employees across all the departments. The training program should be a balanced mix of creating awareness among employees through innovative and engaging training content and giving them a clear step-by-step process of their response to be followed in case of any phishing attacks, social engineering attacks, secure remote working practices, etc.
Phishing simulations can go a long way in training them to pause and think before clicking on any phishing links. Use analytics and reporting techniques by admins to identify organizations’ vulnerabilities across different departments and work towards tightening any security loop poles.
Have a Stringent Password Policy
Having a strict password policy in place contributes a big deal to having a successful, robust cyber security policy directly affecting your organization’s email security. Train your employees to acknowledge the significance of using strong passwords with a long and arbitrary combination of upper and lower case characters, special characters, and numbers.
This is crucial to ward off brute force attacks by hackers to steal crucial login credentials and carry out damaging data breaches.
Employees must be encouraged to follow certain good password security practices like not using the same password across all your accounts, recalibrating passwords regularly. Ensuring the safety of your passwords by storing them in, say, safe vaults provided with password managers used by the organization like LastPass, KeyPass, and many more.
Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Apart from having a strict and strong password policy, it is always advisable to have an additional layer of email security by using multi-factor authentication (MFA) techniques for user verification. In the many instances of breached passwords, the extra layer of MFA comes in as an added valued security feature by giving extra authentication factors to protect your email accounts. This MFA may be in the form of facial and voice recognition, fingerprint scanners, security questions, one-time passwords, and many more.
Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)
(Source: https://www.dmarcanalyzer.com/app/uploads/2017/02/DMARC-analyzer.png )
DMARC is one of the most crucial standards that help organizations verify the authenticity of senders and email domains. Then only approving them and hence, helping them mitigate spoofing emails from trusted sources using various authentication technologies like
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), etc.
It also provides organizations with listings and reports on senders that are misusing their domains. DMARC standards include the rejection of unauthenticated emails by the receiving end-user and guiding them to handle them. Putting emails failing the authentication checks into quarantine, and then later, maybe most of them would be rejected. You can Implement the DMARC standard for your organization as part of services offered by many reputed security solution providers.
In conclusion:
we can say that setting email security as the topmost priority for your organization is the most vital part of having a robust security policy to protect against ever-evolving phishing techniques by hackers. Furthermore, investing in technologies and best practices to secure business emails will take your organization’s security health posture to the next level, winning your client’s trust and seeing the light to success for your businesses.
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