In the contemporary times, the Email is amongst the most used tools for personal and corporate communication.

However, email is inherently insecure. When you send an email, it is in plain text and is saved on the computer of the recipient. There is no guarantee that your communication will be secure either in transit or at rest. You are assuming that the administrator of that computer will not read through your email.

Email may easily serve as a gateway for cyber attacks if proper security measures are not implemented. A single careless act might jeopardize the safety and security of the organization’s email system. Attackers can spoof domains to make their emails appear to be from trustworthy contacts; they can transmit malware and spam over email channels;

Implementing email security best practices can help you prevent and mitigate the risk of email-related cyber attacks. This article outlines five essential business email security best practices to help minimize your exposure to business and security risk.

1. Develop and Enforce Corporate Email Policy

A corporate email policy is a management document that explicitly outlines standards for acceptable email usage in the workplace. An email policy will assist in ensuring that staff understand their obligations while using company email, what they can and cannot do, and that these conditions are agreed upon. This means that an employee can be held liable if the agreed-upon terms are violated. An email policy is essential because it protects your brand, lowers the risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches, and specifies how workers must use company email.

A corporate email policy should include clear instructions on personal usage of corporate email, indicating whether personal emails are acceptable and if they may be used on company devices, among other things. The policy should also handle corporate email retention concerns, limitations on the sorts of files staff can exchange with others, prohibited content and the management of confidential data. An email policy, for example, may indicate that management may view any employee’s email messages that are stored on the mail server but not on the user’s workstation. The email policy may additionally say that employees conduct will be monitored for compliance.

Organizations should develop and maintain a documented policy for email usage as part of their security best practice and instruct employees to adhere to that policy. A process for dealing with those who choose not to comply with the security policies must be developed and enforced so there is a structured method of response to noncompliance

2. Implement Security Awareness Training

Organizations must invest in security awareness training programs to prepare employees for email and other information security threats. A security awareness program is designed to educate users about potential vulnerabilities to an organization’s information and how to prevent circumstances that might compromise the organization’s data. People are the weakest link in information security. You may have the strongest technical controls in place, but if your employees are not effectively trained in detecting and responding to possible security risks, all of those measures will be ineffective. Cybercriminals attempt to hack systems by exploiting flaws in human nature and behavior.

Organizations teach their employees on how to detect and respond to email-related cyberattacks such as email spoofing, spam, social engineering, malicious attachments, phishing, and spear-phishing attempts. In fact, phishing is one of the biggest threats to businesses from email. Phishing emails utilize email fraud, BEC scams, impersonation attempts, and social engineering to fool users into clicking on malicious links, disclosing personal account information, or making fraudulent payments. Despite your best efforts, a phishing email might be so convincing that your employee falls for it.

To obtain the intended results from its security program, a business must convey the what, how, and why of security to its personnel and find a means to motivate them.

Various methods and formats should be employed to reinforce the concepts of security awareness. Things like banners, posters, handbills (both physical and electronic), and even employee handbooks can be utilized to remind employees about their duties and the necessities of good security practices. It should be simple to understand, be kept up-to-date, be positive and humorous, and most of all—be supported by senior management.

3. Implement Strong Email Defenses

With powerful email defenses and security systems in place, organizations can prevent malware threats from reaching users’ mailboxes. Implementing solutions such as email gateways (a type of email server that secures an organization’s internal email servers) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance), among others, is a smart place to start.

A secure email gateway is critical for safeguarding your organization from malicious content in emails, such as phishing attempts, by preventing them from reaching their intended target. A secure email gateway decreases the frequency of successful breaches of user passwords, email hosts, and critical corporate data by quarantining harmful emails or banning the sender.

On the other hand, DMARC protects the company’s domain from being used to send emails linked to security threats. It guarantees the legitimacy of your emails and their deliverability because only authorized IPs can send emails from your domain. It is designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorized use, commonly known as email spoofing. The purpose and primary outcome of implementing DMARC is to protect a domain from being used in business email compromise attacks, social engineering, phishing emails, spoofing, spam, and other forms of email-related attacks.

Other technical defense measures you may wish to consider to secure your email system include:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF) An email authentication method designed to detect forging sender addresses during the delivery of the email.
• DomainKeys Identified Mail An email authentication method designed to detect forged sender addresses in the email (email spoofing), a technique often used in phishing and email spam.
• Specialized Spam Filters Consider configuring your email with spam filters to reduce the number of spam and phishing emails that reach users’ mailboxes.
• Post-Delivery Protection Network admins can utilize this tool to fight against phishing attacks. These solutions sit between users and the gateway and use machine learning algorithms to detect phishing attacks and remove them automatically.
• Other technical controls such as DNS-based blackhole lists (DNSBL), graylisting, spamtraps, SMTP authentication enforcement, and checksumming systems to detect bulk email all help to defend your email against spam.

4. Ensure Better Email Password Management

One of the most important email security best practices is implementing strong password management policies. Previous thinking was that complex equaled strong. Forcing employees to create complex passwords. However, complex passwords such as }k}$4p#F@Q7n, will likely end up being written on a sticky note on a user’s desk or saved in an insecure file on a user’s desktop.

According to current standards, password strength is determined by password length rather than complexity. Password complexity regulations are one of the most onerous habits placed on users by the security industry. For each email account, users are normally asked to submit unique complex passwords, such as a minimum of 8 characters, one upper case, one lower case, one number, and one symbol. They are warned not to write down or repeat their complex password after creating it. However, for many, this appears to be an uphill task. Bill Burr, the man who created those guidelines in 2003, has recognized that they are now essentially obsolete.

While complexity rules make passwords seem secure on the surface, the issue is that most people usually adhere to certain patterns when creating them. These patterns are well known to criminals. Time and again research has shown that users have difficulty remembering those complex passwords, so they end up writing or saving them in places that are easy for an intruder to find, which defeats the whole goal of security in the first place. If a user manages to create a complex password, the next challenge begins: remembering the password and difficulty entering the correct password especially when numbers and special characters are involved. So errors are pretty likely, hence one of the most often pressed buttons is the “I forgot my password“ button to reset the password, and the cycle continues. Security experts all agree that the use of passphrases (the stringing together of a few words) is the way to go. Passphrases are easier to remember and difficult to crack. In other words, length, not complexity, is the new entropy.

5. Implement Email Encryption

Email encryption is a critical email security strategy that protects both personal and corporate email from unauthorized access. The best approach to keep emails safe, like with all digital communication, is to use encryption—complex algorithms that prohibit anyone from accessing the content of your email unless they have the necessary encryption keys.

The primary goal of encrypting emails is to ensure that they are only ever received by their intended receiver, with all data contained inside them secure and intact. Attackers will be unable to access sensitive business emails if organizations utilize encryption. It also safeguards emails against man-in-the-middle assaults. Good email encryption supports End-to-end encryption (where your own data is encrypted on your own device), and only you and the intended recipient can access it), and zero-access encryption (where email is encrypted and decrypted using only your public key and private key respectively).

Most modern email services encrypt emails in any of or a combination of the following methods:

• TLS/SSL encryption in transit This is the same encryption used to secure HTTPS websites, and it is the backbone of all security on the internet.
• Symmetric-key encryption algorithms such as AES to store emails Most email services apply this encryption when an email is stored on its servers. This means the provider holds the encryption keys, which it can use to access your emails for advertising purposes or in response to third-party demands.
• Encrypt emails in transit using TLS and store them on servers using AES All email communications are end-to-end encrypted and are stored on servers using zero-access encryption. This protects the confidentiality and integrity of email messages and makes it difficult for email providers to access your emails for advertising purposes or in response to third-party demands.

OpenPGP provides a way for the end-users to encrypt the email without any support from the server and be sure that only the intended recipient can read it. Other encryption options include PGP and GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). Free and commercial software (desktop application, webmail, and add-ons) are also available. However, there are usability issues and difficulties in getting it to work. But you can easily get around this by using encrypted email providers such as ProtonMail and Tutanota, as well as commercial encryption appliances and services that automate encryption.