Email Security for Small Businesses

Email has become the main form of communication for companies of all kinds in the current digital era, but it also poses a serious security risk, particularly for small enterprises. Sensitive data protection and email conversation secrecy are more important than ever since cyber threats are always evolving and becoming more sophisticated.

Cyberattacks using email servers used by corporations have dramatically increased in the past several years. With the increasing trend of remote work over the past few years, this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Even though remote work is here to stay, most cybersecurity experts are surprised to learn that many organizations—especially smaller ones, which are particularly susceptible to attacks of this kind—haven’t put in place the fundamental cybersecurity procedures needed to protect their systems against Business Email Compromise, or BEC, and other more conventional email-focused cyberattacks.

Business Email Addresses Are Identified as Such

Even though it seems very obvious and uncomplicated, it’s important to mention still. Because work occupies a significant portion of everyone’s life, it may be tempting to register for or log into services using your business email that are inaccessible through your personal accounts. However, if you use the email address provided by your firm for personal internet activity, scammers will have an easier time profiling you, which could result in a much more focused cyberattack. Hackers also have an increased opportunity to acquire your corporate credentials if you use your home Wi-Fi or personal computer, which are less secure than business networks or the specialized computers used in your office. This also takes us.

Avoid Using Work Emails on Public Wi-Fi

Public Wi-Fi is the ideal means for hackers and cybercriminals to steal your sensitive data, even if you’re using your company’s secure computer to access your corporate email account. We advise utilizing a VPN to connect to your critical business servers and enhance your endpoint security when it is not feasible to avoid using a public connection. By establishing a private, encrypted tunnel between the user’s remote computer and the organization’s dedicated servers, a virtual private network, or VPN, operates. Consequently, it will use real-time encryption to safeguard any data you communicate across an unprotected network. See our article “What is a VPN?” to find out more about virtual private networks and how they operate.

Passphrases and Strong Passwords

The first step in hacking an email account for a company is to attempt to guess your password or passphrase using a brute-force assault. We advise all staff to use “strong” passwords or passphrases because of this. When a password is lengthy enough (12–14 characters) and incorporates a variety of capital, lowercase, special characters, and numerals, it is seen to be “strong.” Similar guidelines apply to “strong” passphrases, with the exception that they should have a length of 15 to 20 characters and, if at all feasible, contain letters from foreign languages.

The most crucial thing to keep in mind for each of these is that they must be distinct and intended for a single usage. Depending on how many systems you use at work, you will therefore require a good number of these passwords or passphrases. Therefore, we advise storing all of your special passwords and phrases in a password manager or password vault, which also has a password generator for creating strong passwords. Your passwords will remain safe because they are encrypted; cracking industry-standard encryption, such as 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), is nearly hard, even though password vaults and managers can be compromised. Therefore, even if a hacker manages to “get in” to the vault itself, they won’t be able to access your data.

Training on Attachment Awareness and Phishing Scams

Investing in basic cybersecurity training for each employee is one of the simplest methods to safeguard your company. If your company cannot afford this, we advise educating your staff on the risks associated with phishing schemes and email attachment attacks, which are also referred to as harmful attachments or HTML smuggling. The primary topics to discuss are:

An understanding of typical phishing scams, like impersonating popular pop-up windows like the Microsoft Outlook Login window and visiting phony websites to obtain a user’s login credentials.

understanding of the most typical email attachment formats—.DOCX,.HTML, and.EXE—in which malware can be concealed. This also covers HTML smuggling, a more modern and well-liked type of email cyberattack.

Advise staff members not to click on any link that seems fishy or comes from an unknown sender. The simplest way for scammers to effectively launch a cyberattack against your staff and company is through malicious links, which are typically connected to phishing scam websites.

Email Security Guidelines and Practices

By putting the right email security policies in place, you can safeguard your corporate email system in one of the most significant ways possible. Generally regarded as the primary safeguard against cyberattacks linked to email, email protocols are meant to ensure the security of your messages as they are transferred over webmail providers. To be clear, email protocols are used by mail servers to send emails between recipients’ mail clients. The server is instructed by the protocols on how to handle and send the communications. This process is authenticated and verified by security protocols.

Email domain owners can identify and confirm who is permitted to send emails using their domain names by using SPF.

When a communication is unsuccessful in being validated, domain owners can be alerted and have a response using DMARC.
Email communications between clients and servers are encrypted by SMTPS and STARTTLS.
With DKIM, a user’s identity may be verified by connecting them to a digital signature.
S/MIME specifies the encryption and authentication procedures for MIME-formatted data.

OpenPGP is an email encryption and authentication standard that is built upon the Pretty Good Privacy foundation.
Digital certificates are a means of using public key ownership to validate the sender’s information.
Although SSL/TLS is used for HTTPS, it encrypts network traffic between servers, including webmail messages, so it is not directly utilized for email security.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (set via the DNS records) are used by several well-known email client providers to safeguard the privacy of their customers. For your company email system, we advise putting at least these three into practice.