Out of your company’s technology, we’d argue that your emails are one of the most important. Because of how much your team uses email to communicate, we think you should up your email security protocols, so cybercriminals can’t attack your accounts.Â
The Importance of Email Security
We want you to realize that your business faces constant threats through email, whether you realize it or not. One single malicious email can have a serious impact on your entire business. Basically, if you leave your email accounts unsecured, it’s an open invitation for spam and scams to make their way in. But what can you do to protect them? We have a few ideas:
Identifying Phishing Attacks
You first will want to train your employees to identify phishing attacks that they might be faced with. If you don’t know what a phishing attack is, it’s an email sent by a cybercriminal in order to trick people, often posing as someone authentic. Most of the time, they want you to click a link, download an attachment or reveal sensitive information. These emails usually are trying to gain access to your network so cybercriminals can steal data or send in malware. Some things you can train them on are:
- Checking the sender- If they do not recognize the email address, they should never interact with it (aka opening links, sending over information, downloading files)
- Hover over links- They should never open a link before hovering over it to check what it is. This will show the URL so they can see if they recognize it or if it looks sketchy
- Be mindful of grammar/spelling- Sometimes people make mistakes and even true sources might slip up, but if an email has a ton of grammar and spelling mistakes, you might want to tread carefully. Often, these phishing emails are from countries in which English is not their first language.
- Take it slow- Phishing emails usually call for haste and encourage people to quickly click the link or hop into the scam. Instead, take your time and really investigate before anything is done.
With these tips, hopefully, your employees will be able to spot scams, so they aren’t letting any unwanted people in.
Securing Your Email Backup
You might not know this but the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (STMP) server controls the sending and receiving of emails, and in doing so, they are all stored and kept in the STMP server. These backups are usually unprotected and can be accessed by anyone, so we recommend adding in a layer of security like encryption to help.
Tighten Down Email Security
In the modern age, there are so many security tools that you can layer upon your email servers. There is spam filtering, password-protected attachment scans, impersonation attack detectors, domain background checkers and so much more. We recommend you use a little bit of everything to help your team out. Need help with any of this? MyTek has everything you could ever need and can help figure out what is necessary for your team. Give us a call today at 623-312-2440 to learn more about email security protocols.