Email is among the most preferred communication platforms worldwide. We all use it for free, but have you ever thought about its security?
It is important to know the email security best practice for personal use and employees in order to be safe from data breaches and significant monetary loss.
Email Security Best Practices
Enabling robust email security is the need of time. You need to do so to be safe from data thefts and scams.
Follow these safety tips to take email security measures and protect your data.
1. Use Strong and Unique Passwords
Email accounts with easy passwords make them more vulnerable to hackers.
Secured passwords are difficult to guess and this way, keep your email account safe. Set some unique and strong passwords for your email account that you haven’t used anywhere else.
Some of the tips for strong passwords are:
- It should have at least eight characters.
- Use a combination of both upper and lower case letters.
- Make use of special characters and numbers.
- It is recommended to use random numbers and letters instead of words.
- Don’t set your school, university, hometown, or birthday as your password.
2. Use Two-tier Authentication
There are 3 types of authentication and among these is the Two-tier authentication that adds an extra safety layer to your account.
You can add the two-factor authentication in your email account from the email settings. If your email client hasn’t provided you an option for that, then you can also make use of some specialized software.
3. Do Check For the Phishing Emails
Using Phishing techniques, the hackers appear as a trustworthy entity in front of you and obtain your sensitive data.
They make this fraudulent attempt to devise users. You need to look for phishing attempts to be safe from them.
- Firstly the hacker will send the victim an email with a link that looks familiar to you.
- The victim clicking the link goes to a site that they assume they know, but it is actually a fake site.
- Then the victim is asked to provide their sensitive data like logins, credit card information, etc., on that fake site.
- And this way, the hacker that is behind that fake site gets your sensitive data.
4. Don’t Access Your Email Account on Public WiFi.
Wifi security is quite essential. Public WiFi isn’t secure, and it makes it easy for hackers to steal your data passing through such an unsecured network.
If you want to check your email outside, then make use of mobile data rather than the free public WiFi. Also, you can make use of internet dongles.
Moreover, keep in mind the mobile data security practices.
5. Unsubscribe Link in Email
Most often, you witness your spam filter filled with a large number of emails.
You open one of them and found it be of no interest. Then you find the unsubscribe button in the email and think to click on it in order to stop receiving emails from such recipients.
Please make sure whatever happens, you don’t click that subscribe option in the email.
Hackers most often add such links in the email to fool you. It could be a phishing link, and by clicking on it, you land on a fake site.
Thus don’t click the email unsubscribe option provided by the email recipient.
You can mark such emails as spam and delete them.
Email Security Best Practices for Employees
Cybercrime and data theft affect business operations badly.
Most of the data thefts occur due to poor security of communication.
Thus follow the email security best practices for employees and make your business accounts safe.
1. Company Email Addresses Are Not For Private Emails
Make sure that the company emails are being used for only work-related messages. Ask your employees not to use the communication systems of the company to talk to their friends.
While putting up this measure, you actually protect your business operations and interests. Also, ask them not to connect their smartphone to office WiFi in order to avoid hackers and be under the radar.
2. Scan Email Accounts for Malware
It is a good practice to scan email attachments before opening them.
Well, you can guard your email accounts by going beyond scanning just email attachments and also secure your email accounts with that antivirus.
Also, install endpoint email security software as it will clean up the spam emails from suspicious IP addresses and senders.
Such software ensures that the device asking for organization network access meets the security policy to the fullest or not.
Any remote device whose OS is not up to date or has a firewall turned off is denied access. In short, the devices with security flaws aren’t given access to the network.
Check Out The Difference Between Malware & Spyware
3. Email Server Vulnerabilities
Email servers that store the email can be hacked too.
You can prevent DDoS attacks and spam bots by limiting the number of connections.
Before accepting any incoming message, make sure you have verified the sender via reverse DNS lookup.
Detect spammers with content filtering.
4. Cybersecurity Plan
You can save your organization from online risks by developing a fantastic cybersecurity plan.
Such a plan should include guidelines, requirements, policies, and important recommendations about the usage of technologies in your company.
5. Awareness Training
You can conduct company security awareness training to educate your employees about data security threats and data loss prevention.
Also, they need to beware of how to respond to malicious emails. Furthermore, encourage them to change email passwords regularly.
Email Attachment Security Best Practices
1. Encrypt Email Content
Protect your email content by encrypting it. You can encrypt both the email and its attachments.
Email encryption prevents an unauthorized person from reading the confidential data that you shared via email.
Also Checkout How Data Encryption Works?
2. Scan Unexpected Email Attachments
Being an employee in a reputed company, you will most often receive emails with an attachment from unknown recipients. You can’t trash them all as they can be important too.
To view the attachment first, you need to scan them. For this, you can download anti-malware or antivirus email software.
Also, implement advanced spam filters in your account.
If the software shows that the attachment has a computer virus, then secure your system by deleting the message and blocking that sender.
Best Email Security Software
Some of the best email security software are
- Cisco Email Security
- Mimecast Email Security
- Spambrella
- RMail
- MailChannels
- Proofpoint Email Protection
- FlashStart
- OnDMARC
- Avira Exchange Security
- McAfee Security
Summary
Email is the most preferred collaboration tool, but it comes with some risks too. Phishing, viruses, scam, data breaches, and business email comprising are some of such risks.
Protecting your data is an essential thing to do. Data loss can lead to loose customers. Also, it can set back the productivity timelines of your organization.
Follow the email security best practices for personal use and organizations in order to mark yourself safe from cyber threats and data thefts.
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