Reducing Cyber Risks with Email Protection - the Do's and Don'ts

Cyber threats are everywhere, and they can endanger your business in many ways. One type of threats most professionals fail to recognize adequately is Email related. A lot of cyber risks exist for your email, and you’d be surprised how many different threats can target you through your corporate email. In fact, Email may well be the primary and most common attack vector most cybercriminals use against your business.

They target everyone in the company, and it only takes one person to make a simple mistake of opening a malware link in an email they thought came from a known source, or proceed with a money transfer to a fraudster, and your business will probably suffer from high reputational or financial damages.

The bigger your company is, the more people you need to worry about. According to a 2018 report, 42.6% of all attacks target regular contributors in a company, while the rest target management, upper management, and executives. These are some staggeringly disproportionate numbers, which point to the need for proper email protection for everyone in your company – most notably you and the rest of the upper management structure.

The Dos and Don’ts in Email Protection

There’s a lot that you need to take into account:

• DO be careful with your credentials. Many professionals feel that their credentials are very safe. If you haven’t thought about it in the past nor done something to make sure your credentials are secure – they are probably not. You’d be surprised how easy it is to crack many passwords. Make sure everyone in the company is using multi-factor authentication – it will significantly increase your cyber safety.
• DO learn how to recognize phishing attacks. According to Forbes, half a billion dollars is lost to phishing attacks in the US every single year, making phishing one of the top cyber threats for every business. With that in mind, everyone in your company needs to learn to spot phishing attempts. You need to be wary of emails that use words like urgent and are requesting personal information – no respected business would do this. You also need to check the legitimacy of the email address.
• DON’T trust any email as many of them can easily be fake, even though they appear genuine. Familiarize yourself with business email compromise, and you’ll see how common it is for executives and other employees to unknowingly send money or data to cybercriminals. You need to have proper email protection against business email compromise.
• DON’T trust attachments and links. Many cyber risks stem from automatic clicking of every link and attachment in an email. Everyone in the company needs to make sure that the sender and also what they’re sending is legitimate before clicking on a link or opening an attachment.

The main message we would like to impart to you is to be careful with how your employees use your corporate email, for professional or personal use, and make sure you have an effective email security protection for everyone in the company. With all of that, you will undoubtedly reduce the many cyber risks that could target your business.