Emails are among the most crucial parts of your company’s communications, which is why protecting them from cyber-attacks. Trust is, most of these threats are unavoidable given the digital or cloud-based networks used by many businesses today. To avoid giving up sensitive information or ruining your company’s reputation in the market, it’s best to set up a strong cloud email security solution.
Implementing threat-ready protection will help you prevent attacks or minimize their impact on your data and processes. If you are concern about how you can have proactive email security and safeguard your key assets, follow the strategies below.
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Consider multiple email accounts
Like using investment instruments, it is never a smart move to put all your money in one place. To reduce the risk of a complete fallout when your email account gets attacked, it’s best to utilize separate accounts for various purposes.
For instance, you can create a dedicated email account for your website accounts and social media notifications, one for your networking and sales, and another for your financial information or statements. While this might seem too much of work, it can significantly minimize the risk of a negative chain of email attacks.
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Create multi-factor authentication
Among the security processes for email accounts is multi-factor authentication, known as two-step verification and two-factor authentication. This security process will require every user to provide two different authentication factors like a unique passcode and a password.
Multi-factor authentication can also provide an extra layer of security to prevent a cybercriminal from accessing the account. In general, creating multi-factor authentication can help minimize the risk of your email accounts being compromised if your passwords are stolen.
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Establish better user training
If you want to quickly identify the signs of email phishing attacks, it’s best to train your staff as well. This will prevent the opening of unsafe attachments and links and understand how to handle attacks better. In creating your own user training, the information provided must be relevant and up-to-date.
To promote increased awareness, the training sessions should also include scenario-based penetration testing. This is beneficial for detecting and addressing vulnerabilities in your email security. Such assessments are typically done with the help of cybersecurity experts. Attack techniques will be replicated to train the users in evaluating and responding to email attacks.
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Perform regular password resets
Resetting passwords more frequently can be challenging and time-consuming work, but it can significantly heighten the security of your email accounts. This is, in fact, a general security practice business or not. Some practical password practices to implement include using a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, special characters, longer passwords, and not utilizing similar passwords for your multiple email accounts.
Following these practices can do improve email security, but they don’t necessarily alleviate the attacks. This is why changing your account passwords frequently is highly suggested. You can also frequently change your email settings if an incorrect password is triggered.
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Utilize a stronger security firewall
Another critical part of improving your email security procedures is by using a stronger security firewall. Keep in mind, though, that firewall management is a risky and challenging process. If you don’t have a highly qualified team to properly maintain or upgrade your current gateways, it’s wise to acquire a cloud-based firewall solution from a prominent security company.
At the same time, it’s recommended to establish an approval process for any changes on your firewall from the security department or the requester’s manager. Such approvals must be added even on a follow-up email that authorizes the update. Other helpful practices for improving your security firewall include building a consistent change schedule, having an official request system, shutting off unused network services, and creating virtual perimeters.
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Don’t access email via public networks
No matter how convenient it may seem, accessing your business email accounts via public networks or computers is never a good security practice. Using unsecured devices can make your accounts vulnerable to cyber attacks. Even data center computers can target various security hacking attempts such as data-packet sniffing and keystroke logging. If you need to access your business email accounts via public networks, you should have multi-factor authentication in place for an additional level of protection.
Don’t let hackers or any unauthorized person access your confidential customer information or private financial statements by performing these strategies. In that way, you can better protect your emails and their contents from cyber threats that can potentially damage your name.
