Email security: what do you need to know?

Emails generally contain confidential information. These contents are sometimes the object of covetousness on the part of ill-intentioned people. So, to ensure email security, it’s important to implement various techniques. Find out all you need to know about email security in this article.

What is mail security?

Mail security is a set of techniques designed to protect sensitive information contained in e-mail communications. Content must be protected against unauthorized access, loss or compromise.

Hackers use e-mail to spread malware, spam and phishing attacks. Through deceptive messages, they trick recipients into divulging sensitive information, opening attachments or clicking on links that lead to the installation of dangerous software. These can cause damage to the victim’s equipment.

E-mails are also used to storm a company’s network to obtain valuable information.

It’s important to remember that e-mail messages are encrypted to hide their content. In this way, confidential information is protected from being read by unauthorized persons. In addition, e-mail encryption includes authentication.

How secure is email?

In principle, an email is designed to be opened and accessed. In fact, it is used as a communication tool between members of several organizations or between different employees of a company.

The main concern is the lack of email security. This flaw benefits hackers who use emails as a means of accessing confidential information within a structure. They try to exploit the lack of e-mail security through spam campaigns, malware, phishing attacks, sophisticated targeted attacks or the compromise of business e-mail.

Moreover, the use of e-mail is widespread within organizations, which use it to carry out operations. As a result, a hacker attack can recover information linked to a company’s various transactions.

We’ve seen a lot of email attacks since companies started exchanging confidential information. In this way, a hacker could easily access the contents of the e-mails and use them to his advantage.

However, measures have been taken to secure email content. This makes it more difficult for hackers to attack sensitive or confidential information exchanged within a company.

What security policies are there to protect emails?

There’s no denying it: e-mail is of major importance to any business. For this reason, policies have been put in place to effectively manage this flow of information.

Email protection policies are pretty straightforward. These include sending suspicious content to a Sandboxing tool for better verification, and deleting all executable content from e-mails for detailed analysis.

It should be noted that security policies have been put in place to detect security incidents and provide usable information on the scale of attacks suffered. What’s more, organizations will be able to determine the extent of the damage caused by a potential attack.

What are the best practices for email security?

Setting up an e-mail gateway is one of the first ways to secure a company’s e-mail. An e-mail gateway is used to compartmentalize threats by analyzing and processing incoming and outgoing e-mails from an organization.

What’s more, companies are increasingly faced with sophisticated attacks from hackers. As a result, basic security measures such as blocking malicious files can no longer protect the content of your e-mails. A better option is to use a secure e-mail gateway with a multi-layer approach.

As a company, you can also use Altospam to ensure the security of your emails. It’s an e-mail security software. Its role is to filter your emails and quickly remove spam and unwanted mail.

Adopting an automatic e-mail encryption solution is also a good practice for keeping organizations’ e-mails secure. Once this analysis has been carried out, sensitive content is encrypted before being sent by e-mail. This procedure prevents hackers from viewing mail when they intercept it.

Another practice is to train employees to use e-mail wisely and to detect malicious e-mails. In fact, the latter may escape the sorting performed by the secure messaging gateway. In this case, users will be able to detect harmful content. Training e-mail users to spot and report suspicious e-mails is a key part of this process.