In today’s digital environment, there are countless threats to people’s data and privacy. For businesses, it’s a critical bottom-line issue that can affect their very survival. And finding ways to defend business networks from intrusions, data theft, and ransomware threats is a full-time job.
But if you take the time to examine today’s most common threats, you’ll find that many of them use email systems as an attack vector. This is because email is one of the most used digital services among businesses and is often lightly defended. And that makes email security more important than ever for any business that’s serious about defending itself.
Email Security is the Front Line of Cybersecurity
Email is used as the starting point for a variety of malicious attacks on a business network. It may be used to steal user credentials via phishing scams. It’s used to perpetrate payment fraud by submitting falsified invoices to unsuspecting businesses. It’s even used to deliver various malware and ransomware into business networks via infected links embedded in messages.
And a successful attack using any one of those methods can be catastrophic. Targeted businesses may end up losing large sums of money, or even suffer irreparable harm from data loss and intellectual property theft. And much of it is preventable with some additional email security.
Basic Email Security Methods
To tighten up email security, businesses can use some simple methods. They can deploy anti-phishing and anti-malware software at the server level. They can institute data protection measures like data backup and compartmentalized permissioning. And they can make an effort to educate their workers on how to spot common scams and email-based fraud attempts.
There are even some advanced email security solutions that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to spot suspicious emails before they cause trouble. They make the odds of a successful email-based attack much smaller and are becoming more commonplace every day.
However they opt to do it, it’s clear that email security is a critical part of cybersecurity as a whole. And any business that wants to keep its systems and data safe should reexamine how it defends against email-based attacks. And it doesn’t take much effort to have a major positive impact on a business’s odds of avoiding costly and damaging cyberattacks.