Email security is a vital necessity because email contains sensitive information. Due to the high usage of such means of information transfer, it has since become a major target for attack. This and many more reasons are why companies are favoring the use of cloud-based email services like Gmail, Outlook, Protonmail, etc.
What is Email Security?
Email Security is the necessary precautions, techniques, and methods used to prevent sensitive email content, email accounts, and email communication from being tampered with.
Email is the largest attack target for cybercriminals for the spread of malware. It is an important aspect of an organization’s communication system because it enables users to easily communicate, and it is supported by various devices. Email is being used to send several types of information e.g. text, document, or media, and communications via the medium can be tracked, stored, and organized according to attributes such as time and date stamps and size.
How does Email work?
An email when sent does not go straight to the recipient. Instead, it travels between networks and servers, some vulnerable and unsecured, before landing in an inbox. Even though an individual’s computer may be secure from an attacker, the network or server the email has to travel through may have been compromised which will pose a threat. Cybercriminals can also easily impersonate a sender or change email information such as body copy, attachments, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), or the sender’s email address. Because each email has sections that provide metadata identifying information about the email, who it originated from, where it is headed, and so on, this is extremely simple for a hacker attacking an unsecured system. If a hacker has access to this metadata and modifies it, the email will appear to have come from someone or somewhere it did not.
Types of email attack
When it pertains to email attacks, cybercriminals employ a variety of methods, some of which can do significant damage to an organization’s data and/or reputation. Each of the following approaches can be used to install malware, which is malicious software designed to harm or manipulate a device or its data.
- Phishing: Phishing entails sending an SMS, direct message, or email to a user. The attacker poses as a trusted person or institution, then takes advantage of the target’s trust to steal sensitive information such as account numbers, credit card numbers, or login information. Phishing comes in several forms, such as spear phishing, regular phishing, and whaling. Spear phishing targets a particular person, while whaling targets someone high up in the organization by pretending to be someone they trust.
- Spam: Users are targeted in a phishing attempt by receiving a text, direct message, or email. The attacker poses as a trusted person or institution, then exploits the target’s confidence to steal sensitive information such as account numbers, credit card numbers, or login information. Spam is the most common attack vector, as 71% of ransomware was delivered by spam in 2016
- Spoofing: Spoofing is a dangerous email threat because it deceives the recipient into believing the message came from someone other than the apparent sender. As a result, spoofing is a powerful business email compromise (BEC) tactic. Because the email platform just sees the metadata—the same data that the attacker has changed—it is unable to distinguish a forged email from a legitimate one. This makes it quite straightforward for an attacker to impersonate someone the target knows or respects.
Email security measures
Ransomware, an advanced threat that may affect numerous endpoints and steal critical data, is spread mostly by email. As a result, to secure email traffic in real-time, an email protection plan should incorporate the following recommended practices.
- A spam filter: This can detect spam emails and either prevent them from entering the inbox or send the email to the trash folder.
- Email encryption: hides corporate emails by converting them into a jumbled mess of letters, numbers, and symbols that no one can decipher.
- Antivirus protection: Antivirus software scans emails and attachments for viruses, alerting the user if anything suspicious is found.
- A secure email gateway (SEG): filters out potentially harmful emails based on an IT administrator’s parameters.
- MFA (multi-factor authentication): MFA is a critical data loss prevention and anti-hacking solution since it requires a user to submit additional information.
