Are you having a big concern about how cyberattacks and data breaches could impact your overall business growth? Does your enterprise propose spending their budgets on confidential data security? If your answer to these two questions is Yes, you have to concentrate on your personal efforts too. This requires email security best practices that are to be implemented from the end of employees or end-users.
A Surprising Fact – Despite its pervasive use and age, emails are considered as one of the top attack vectors when it is about security breaches. As per the Data breach statistics, it is being found that the email system is the main source for cybercrime occurrence in 96% of situations. These situations are generally caused due to human errors, which result in a security disaster, and 46% of malware gets installed via email. It is also being observed that organizations are only having 16 min until the initial click on a phishing campaign. Unluckily, the first report from an individual who recognizes the scam email will only be reported after 28 minutes.
Let’s Have A Closer Look at How Attackers Use Emails As A Means
According to the X-Force report, below pointed are popular email security threats that are caused via mailing system :
- Dropping Malware – If an email comprises malicious attachments, opening the attachment leads to the spreading of malware on the entire PC. It is simple for hackers to fool users worldwide and force them to open the malicious document, present in the mail.
- Malicious Web Links – A malicious link is like an email client that navigates the receiver towards a website where the target’s crucial data will be harvested. People assume that they are working on a secure website because of which they click on this malicious link.
Email Security Best Practices For Employees
It is being found that the majority of the data breaches are held due to bad email security practices. There are chances when an intruder who is penetrating your email machine may manage to steal passwords or confidential data. So, it’s now time to go through the following measures, and if they are not used till today’s date, implement them as soon as possible.
- Make Use of Multilingual Passwords – This tip should be given to all employees of an office. It says that you have to set multilingual passwords for securing an account via credentials. Never ever use only numeric passwords like contact number, DOB, etc., because they are easy to guess. One can strengthen the account by using special characters, numbers, uppercase, and lowercase alphabets.
- Use Two-tier Authentication Method – Another email security best practice recommend the use of a two-tier authentication process because it is quite straightforward. It adds ups an extra protection layer in cloud information security. Email clients like Gmail, Microsoft Office 365, Zoho, etc., provide different ways to its business consumers to use this service in their tenant. The entire concept is simple & excellent for the DLP method.
- Keep Your Mind Active In Office Hours – Whenever an employee is working with his or her email account, he or she should be conscious. Users should be known from the domain’s nature, which they haven’t encountered before the current time. Phishing attacks are a straightforward concept for hackers to steal email profile data. Therefore, this email security best practice 2018 recommends businesses to make variations in the password of each employee.
- Never Open Unexpected Attachments – There are chances where receivers might encounter unexpected attachments in an email. It is the duty of enterprise administrators to train their employees with a lesson – they should never ever access emails with new attachments, coming from unknown senders. If they receive such emails, immediately contact the business administrator, and then perform any operation.
- Train Employees With Email Usage – Email security best practice 2018 states that employees need to limit down the chances of attackers who are targeting their email system. This is easy to achieve by implementing an enhanced endpoint security solution and ensure that only official emails are coming in the respective email client. Develop fear in the hearts of business employees in a way that they don’t even try to use official ids for personal use.
Extra Tips To Be Taken By Business to Train Their Employees
- Regularly conduct training session to aware new and remind existing employee with cloud security policies of your business
- Impose restriction on the use of personal Email Ids in premises to prevent leakage of business data via email communication
- Restrict use of public WiFi during office hours and connect employee’s PC from firm private networks
- Give training to office workers that they should not click on unsubscribe links in spam messages
Join Hands With CloudCodes CASB Solution For Ease
Email data protection is easy to achieve when email service providers and their consumers both show their equal efforts. If anyone of the entity takes security forsake, in no time cyberattack can occur. Different surveys say that providers are giving their best from their end, but consumers are not equally active. So it’s to open your eyes and make use of CloudCodes CASB Solutions for gaining strong email security! This approach provides equal efforts like that of CSPs in protecting data online. Apart from this, email security best practices for employees (described in this post) should be utilized to avoid threat caused due to human unintentional errors.