How to Improve Your Company Email Security Hygiene in 2021?

Today, criminals are far less likely to barge into your company doors and take stuff. Instead, they do it behind a laptop, attacking through email.

As a business owner, it’s important to understand and know how to deal with email attacks, but you can’t be the only line of email security defense.

Your employees must do so as well.

So let’s take a look at a few things that will teach you how to improve your company email security hygiene in 2021 and beyond.

Multi-Factor Authentication Must be Mandatory and Not Optional

A strong email password is without a doubt important, but it’s only the first step in protecting against cyber threats.

Hackers will first target weak passwords, so making sure your employees are not using any is vital.

For example, you should change passwords frequently. For most businesses, changing passwords quarterly at least works best.

However, your employees might have some trouble memorizing passwords that contain upper-case and lower-case letters, numbers and special characters, so a good password manager can come in handy.

That being said, a strong password alone, while great, will probably not be enough to deter a cyber attacker. What you also need is to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) as an extra layer of email security and to make its use mandatory for all employees.

Enforce and Document a Strong Company-Wide Email Security Policy

MFA is an important step to prevent email account takeover, but even that can be bypassed by skilled attackers.

You also must have a documented company-wide email policy that your employees should follow closely.

This is something you must observe at all times as it only takes one email to spread malware and lead to a breached system.

That is why your employees must be familiar with what kind of data they can or can’t send via email, what types of files they should avoid downloading and who in the company is authorized to handle company sensitive information over email.

Make Time for and Invest In Email Security Training and Education

Of course, it’s not enough to only put these things to paper or talk to your employees about them once and then forget about it.

These things must be ingrained in your employees’ minds, so it is important to invest time (and money) in email security training.

However, this is not a one-and-done thing. Instead, it must be consistently done for your employees to be able to recognize and respond to cyber threat actors sending email attacks.

Of course, not only your employees, but you as well should participate in email security education as this is an important part of a good security hygiene a business should have.

Ensure That Employees Can Easily and Quickly Report Suspicious Messages and Malicious Links

A lot of companies do all of the above, but fail at one thing that is crucial for email security.

Their employees don’t have a way to easily report phishing emails containing malicious links.

It’s important to make it easy for them to report phishing emails or other problematic messages.

Especially today, with a lot of Coronavirus-themed phishing emails, you need to keep an eye on this.

For example, they can mark suspicious messages that contain a potentially malicious link and then forward them to the security team who can take it from here.

Audit Your Email-Sending Platforms and Email Servers

A lot of enterprises use cloud solutions to send emails on their behalf, whether to potential customers or to their own employees.

But how much are you keeping track of these as part of your company cyber hygiene?

You might find that a lot of these services are not used very often or that you’re better off not using them at all.

In addition, a lot of companies will have orphaned mail servers that are still sending out emails actively, which is simply bad for their cyber hygiene.

These can allow a hacker to gain access to your enterprise network so unless you are using them for a legitimate business purpose, shut them down immediately.

Conclusion

Nearly every business is a target of email attacks and other types of cyber threats.

So far in 2021, cybercrime has already cost companies $6 trillion globally. A lot of this has to do with Coronavirus-related phishing attacks that those working remotely are can especially be vulnerable to.

This is why it’s important to have a strong cyber hygiene and step up your email security and inform employees how to best use email and what to do about suspicious messages and phishing emails.

This is where all the things we mentioned here come into play to keep your business safe from attackers.

However, for the best email security and to protect you against business email compromise, you need an email service that will truly keep your organization safe. That service is CTemplar. Sign up today for a secure email account with CTemplar.

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