How to increase email security in your company

How to increase email security in your company

IT Security, Technical articles | 31. October 2023 | 4 min |

Whether sending or receiving, most companies are involved in email traffic every day, as emails are an indispensable means of internal and external communication in day-to-day business.

However, it is precisely this popular medium, communication via email, that also offers the biggest target for cybercrime. Through phishing emails, for example – emails that look trustworthy but are fraudulent – malware and other malicious software quickly find their way into your company’s data system.

For this reason, it is even more important that you implement a robust email security strategy to increase email security in your company and thus protect your confidential company data and systems.

The best way to do this is to implement various technological IT security measures for email communication in your company at the same time:

  • Spam filters and anti-virus software: Automated systems help to detect suspicious emails and block them. This allows harmful content to be identified before it reaches the inbox of one of your employees.
  • Email encryption: Email encryption can be used to protect sensitive information. This ensures that the content can only be viewed by authorized persons.
  • Digital signature: A digital signature ensures that the email remains unchanged and was sent by the “right” person.
  • Authentication protocols: Technologies such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) are used to authenticate emails and prevent spoofing attacks (pretending to be someone else’s identity).

But even the best technical basis, be it a firewall or specific email encryption, is useless if people themselves are the weakest link in the IT security chain. After all, a single rash click can have serious consequences despite the technological IT security precautions.

The methods used by cyber criminals to gain access to data and/or place malware on devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

 

Cyber criminals use these two tactics to exploit the “human” vulnerability:

#1 Social engineering – human behavior is exploited

Cyber criminals rely on our emotional nature. Under pressure, fear, pity or trust, cyber criminals tempt users to open phishing emails with infected links or attachments. It is not uncommon for confidential data such as passwords or bank details to be disclosed. Social engineering – a scam that works on a large scale, can cause major damage and poses a huge risk to companies’ email security.

 

#2 Spoofing attacks – feigning false facts

Another tactic is so-called “spoofing attacks”, in which cyber criminals “steal” the identity of a trusted person or employee and send urgent emails, often with links. The recipient of such an email usually has no idea who they are really in contact with. It is therefore important to pay attention to details in emails. In the event of unusual language, writing style, lack of context and incorrect/missing signatures, your employees should delete the email and report the incident to a person with administrative authority/IT security officer in the company. If you are concerned about IT security, the “supposed” sender should also be contacted personally via a separate, trustworthy channel (e.g. telephone) to ask whether the email really came from him or her.

 

The basic rule is: be careful with email communication

To ensure that you can rely on your employees as well as the technology to increase your company’s email security, certain IT security standards must be adhered to.

This includes regularly educating and raising awareness among employees, colleagues and customers about the risks involved in email communication. Unfortunately, many people are still not sufficiently aware of the dangers of email communication, even though news of hacker attacks and malware in companies and government agencies are on the rise. This is why regular IT security training should not be neglected. This is the only way to ensure that knowledge of the constantly evolving cybercrime is always up to date so that phishing emails in the form of social engineering or spoofing can be recognized and, in the best case, even fended off.
Regular IT security training should be used to raise awareness of the risks in email traffic in order to reduce the threat of email attacks. Even before opening an email, the sender should be critically checked for authenticity. If it is an unknown external sender, caution should always be exercised and the origin of the email should be confirmed, otherwise it should remain unopened.

Employees should also have expert IT contacts who they can contact easily if they have any doubts about the authenticity of an email or a sender.

Consequently, a functioning interaction between technology and people is necessary and must be checked again and again to ensure basic security in your company’s email communication.

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