E-mail or electronic mail in the professional sphere was a turning point for companies, it facilitates and accelerates communications between members of the organization, and with regard to external collaborators, such as customers and suppliers.
It became especially popular at the beginning of the XNUMXst century, thanks to the spread of the Internet. Today it is one of the most used communication tools in organizations, having incorporated more and more features and functions. For this reason, email has become one of the preferred targets of cybercriminals, with attacks through this medium growing year after year.
In this line, and as part of a general digitalization process, organizations have been incorporating different technical defense methods to improve their cybersecurity: antivirus, firewalls, vulnerability analysis, etc.
However, all the effort invested may not be enough if a series of best practices for email security are not applied. In this article, we'll explain the risks associated with this type of messaging tool and what steps can be taken to make it a safe environment.
What security measures can I take?
Although there are different types of actions, none of them can guarantee complete protection by itself, so it is advisable to implement as many as possible. On the positive side, they are relatively easy to adopt and will help us to avoid our account being compromised, our identity being impersonated, or our company falling victim to phishing or other cyber threats.
While strong passwords are essential for protecting access to your email account or other services, cybercriminals' ability to crack them requires new security measures. To this end, it makes sense to implement multi-factor authentication, which involves verifying the user's identity in at least two different ways, in order to securely access their account.
Cybersquatting is a spoofing strategy that involves buying domains similar to the original company for illegitimate purposes. We can avoid this type of attack by registering variations of our domain name, for example, removing, replacing or adding a letter to the one we are going to use.
On the other hand, if our domain name expires, a third party could take advantage of it to buy it and thus impersonate our company's identity in the eyes of customers and other employees. To avoid this situation, we can renew the domain name before it expires, even if we are no longer using it.
Another common type of attack is email spoofing, which is based on spoofing the sender's email address to impersonate a person or identity.
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In this scenario, we can configure different email authentication measures so that messages sent with our domain name by third parties are considered spam, or so that the reception of illegitimate messages is limited. As in the previous case, by configuring it we would not only be protecting our company, but also our customers and employees, thus preventing our image from being compromised.
In this sense, our personal data is also an important aspect to take into account, as a cybercriminal could use the information that we publish on social networks or other means of communication to give greater credibility to a phishing campaign. Therefore, as a general rule, it is advisable to limit the information we publish about ourselves, especially our work and personal e-mail addresses.
Cybersecurity culture: the best defense measure
In one way or another, the use of technologies may jeopardize the security of our information systems. For this reason, it is essential to promote a culture of cybersecurity among the members of our organization, both to comply with established security measures and to identify the threats to which we are exposed when using email, especially messages that contain:
- References to payments or changes to bank details, for example when requesting urgent payments. Having procedures in place for these types of transactions can help prevent serious incidents.
- Attachments or links when we don't know the sender. In this case, it is essential to confirm the legitimacy of the message before opening any file or link.
In short, email has become one of the preferred means of cybercriminals to carry out their attacks, as it is relatively easy to create and gives them the opportunity to access a large number of users, both companies and individuals. Faced with these threats, we have at our disposal different easy-to-apply measures that will allow us to guarantee a higher level of security for our organization. In addition, they will help us to prevent our own identity or that of our company from being imitated, thus compromising your trust with your different collaborators.
