Email security Reading Time: 4 minutes

Emails have been the easiest and quick mode of communication be it for personal or for business reasons by far. However, hackers find emails as the easy medium to spread malware through deceptive spam emails convincing target victims to click open the attachments or links that comes along. By opening the link or attachments the users are directed to malicious websites or end up opening a malicious document by this way the attackers install the malware from backend on to the user’s system and therefore gains access to the company’s network to steal company’s data causing security breach.

Email security ensures that there is control over the content access of an email account. An email service provider deploys efficient email security to protect subscribed email accounts and data from hackers both when is at rest and when it is passed on to the recipient.

What is Email Security?

Email security can be explained in a broader term, it incorporates a range of security techniques to secure the email accounts and email security services. A proactive email security for any individual user includes strong passwords, spam filters, password rotations, antispam software.A service provider provides email security by implementing a strong password, using access control techniques on an email server, ensuring that the email messages are digitally signed and encrypted when the emails are in the inbox or in transit. It ensures to implement the spam filtering applications to restrict suspicious emails.

With the alarming rise of security breaches through constant evolution of cyber-attacks, Email security has become a priority for both individuals and businesses.
Therefore, Email Security goes mandatory for both personal and business email accounts. Organizations should look forward in implementing multiple security measures to enhance email security.

The Need for Email Security

Both Individual and business users rely on emails as their effective source of communication. However, users are not sure if the emails sent and received are secure from the prying hackers. Emails when left unprotected can be accessed by unauthorized accounts and can infest the emails with malicious mails and can be quite destructive. Hackers send genuine looking malicious emails and trick users to open the attachment or link that comes along. By doing so users get redirected to malicious websites which certainly compromises the users’ system and devices and leads to data breaches.

Phishing emails deceive the users to share personal and sensitive data. Phishing attacks often target departments that take care of sensitive information in any business. Phishing emails incorporate a sense of urgency to successfully gain access to the sensitive information. Spam emails are crafted by hackers to ask victim recipients to confirm passwords, bank account numbers, login credentials and even card numbers. Sometimes hackers design websites that look exactly like a reputable vendor to convince victims to share their financial or any other sensitive information.

Spam emails are highly dangerous and can cost a company millions to recover from security breaches.

Viruses when installed on to your system, it can affect master boot records, remove sensitive information, encrypt files and restrict the users from accessing the system and more.

In the recent times, a denial of service attack has become more common and is crafted to choke the company’s email server and interfere with the usual operations. The consistent flow of attacks on the mail server gives way to large volume of incoming emails and attachments and causes a lot of inconveniences and loss of data.

Necessity of securing emails therefore arises and company’s should validate their email security service to check if they are tied up with multiple sturdy data centres.

With email playing the most integral role in each of our lives almost everyday, it’s therefore vital to put an effective email security system in place to stay ahead of email threats.

Enterprise Email Security and End User Email Security Solutions

It’s not just the responsibility of the companies to incorporate an effective email security system it is equally critical for end users to follow some best practices to ensure email security. Employees should be trained to avoid clicking on vulnerable links and malicious attachments and be wary of exciting offers that are too good to believe. Instilling some best practices by end-users would aim to reduce security that possibly comes along with emails. Following are some of the best email security practices of end-users

  • Do not click on links or open attachments that comes along emails from unknown senders
  • Create strong passwords and change passwords at regular intervals
  • Avoid sharing passwords with co-workers
  • Do not send sensitive information via emails and in case there is a requirement, send the sensitive information to the intended recipients.
  • Implement the use of antivirus software and also an effective spam filters
  • Stay connected through VPN access to corporate emails while working from remote or while using personal device.
  • Refrain from using company email id when connected with public hotspots.
  • Train employees to enforce proper ethics to secure emails
  • Enforce data protection techniques and methods to understand sensitive data and prevent it from being lost.

Anti-Spam & Email Security Software

A comprehensive Antispam & Email Security Software is a must-have to deliver effective email protection. A multi-faceted protection is required to protect email infrastructure and provide robust anti-spam coverage and fends off malware threats that attempts to get connected through emails.

Installing an effective anti-spam and email security software would provide the following benefits

  • Delivers 97% spam detection
  • Delivers protection against zero day and unknown threats
  • Ensures protection against buffer over-flow attacks and Denial of service attacks

Comodo Internet Security

Dome Antispam

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