Protect your Brand with Secure Email
Why Email Security matters
A compromised email system can put sensitive information at risk and impact your business in the worst possible way.
One unpleasant scenario is where hackers obtain credit card information or customer data that would enable identity theft. It’s your responsibility as a business owner to keep customer data secure.
Potential damages
Brand reputation
Domain theft
Phishing scam
Sensitive information
Financial information
For Business, use Secure Email Hosting
Back to email security. The massive user base of free email services is an attractive target for hackers, so using a free service is inherently less secure than if you pay for email hosting. It’s also possible that you could lose access to a free email account, for example, if it gets suspended because of the misdeeds of a hacker who has gained access.
If your business email service is run on your hosting provider’s managed servers, you’ll have full control over your account and be able to rely on their experts to help keep your data safe. You’ll know exactly what security measures are taken by your host, and have the power to implement additional security as you see fit.
When it comes to email security, a high-quality hosting plan does a lot of the heavy lifting.
The best hosting providers go out of their way to implement bulletproof email security: from the implementation and management of server firewalls, monitoring, and intrusion detection to DDoS attack prevention and response. If a problem occurs, there will typically be system resource redundancy, so there’s no interruption in service.
With your provider’s security pros on the case, there are only a few things you’ll have to concern yourself with regarding the protection of your business email. We’ll discuss those things in the next section.
Partner with the Best
The right Partner for Web Hosting can ease a lot of this effort, so look for Native Protection for Email when selecting your Hosting Partner.
There are two types of email security products included – Outbound Filtering and Inbound Filtering.
Outbound Filtering
The Outbound filtering lets you scan and outgoing emails and then send them to prevent IP blacklisting while achieving better email deliverability.
It is a cloud SMTP relay product that can detect and block spammers. Using it, you can remove email delivery issues due to IP blacklisting, and it automatically closes compromised scripts and accounts for better security. It is laced with world-class phishing and spam detection technology, notifies on identifying spam, offers multi-password support, provides log search, allows different console users, and provides insights of total emails sent.
Inbound Filtering
Inbound Filtering lets you secure your inbox from phishing, spam, malware, and other online threats. It is also a cloud spam filter that offers simple integration using our Control Panel and offers multi-layered protection. It has the newest security standards, like SSL/TLS, DMARC, DKIM, SPF, and more. You can manage to block from your inbox directly by using Quarantine Digest, tag spams, and get detailed logs.
We use a simple, intuitive, and powerful user interface crafted with modern technologies to let you manage your contacts efficiently. Operating across different cloud systems, it delivers 99.99% uptime while minimizing fewer failure points.
Business Email Security Best Practices
Business email security is easier for solopreneurs. The business owner has special responsibility for keeping the business email secure. Adding a single employee, and their email account, the chances for a security breach increase, especially since the second user may not be aware of email security best practices.
This section covers four business email security best practices that you should follow, and, if you have employees, all these recommendations call for defining strict policy guidelines. You’ll need to regularly remind employees about the security guidelines and constantly reiterate how important email security is to the business.
1. Use an unhackable password
Hackers break into systems by obtaining a user’s password, sometimes by secretly installing key-logging software on your computer. In other cases, they guess the right password, but that only happens when the account owner has set a hackable password.
What makes a password hackable?
It’s too short, it’s too simple, or it’s based on the account holder’s personal info.
An email password, especially when protecting your business email account, should be a unique, strong password.
When you set your email password, use a combination of upper- and lower-case letters, include numbers and special characters, and don’t use personal info like names and birthdates. A system-enforced password policy can handle all this for you by making it impossible to create passwords that don’t meet specific criteria, or you can simply apply the rules yourself and instruct employees to do the same.
2. Set up two-factor authentication
Given that business email is more sensitive than personal email, with higher stakes if a security breach occurs, business owners are justified in implementing what would otherwise be an extreme security measure. Enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) for business email accounts is one of the best ways to lock down access to those accounts. After entering their password with 2FA in place, the user receives a code, usually via text or email. Only with that code can they complete the login process.
If you have any financial services accounts, say a banking or personal investment account, there’s a good chance the provider spent the last couple of years encouraging you to use 2FA.
Then they decided for you, requiring that all accounts use 2FA.Those companies protect people’s money and focus more heavily on security than businesses in other industries. All business owners should learn from the financial services industry’s broad adoption of 2FA as a crucial component of account security.
3. Beware of business-focused phishing scams
One of the main ways hackers exploit email is through phishing attacks, attempting to get sensitive data like login credentials and credit card data. Hackers make their messages appear as if they’re coming from a trusted source, but they’ll include malicious download links or attachments designed to install malware on your computer.
Most of us have become sensitive to the sort of phishing scams that come through our personal email. They’re usually pretty easy to spot. Email scams targeted at businesses tend to be slightly more sophisticated.
Hackers often employ something called spear phishing. It involves a lot of work from the criminal, but the result is a highly customized message intended to fool a specific target organization. The hacker’s email will be a clone of a trusted company’s message, matching the logo, font, and brand colors. They’ll use an email domain that, at first glance, looks like the real thing, but upon closer examination has a misspelling.
Hackers use these tactics because they work. Even experienced users who are on the lookout for such attacks sometimes fall for them. It’s important to remind employees that they should carefully check emails and be wary of links and attachments. Malicious links, usually with shortened URLs to aid their disguise, can be hard to detect. All users of your business email should preview links with a tool like CheckShortURL.
With vigilance, you can avoid falling for phishing scams and keep your business email secure.
4. Protect your business email
If you own a small business, email security should be a top priority. Hackers will exploit any weakness, so you must take steps to protect your business from their malicious activities.
Using a managed email hosting service is one of the most important elements of business email security. With commercial email hosting, you can rely on the provider’s security experts to implement measures like server firewalls and intrusion detection.
Best practices like keeping your personal and business email separate, hardening your email security with strong passwords and two-factor authentication, and keeping an eye out for malicious links also go a long way in keeping your business email secure. If you and your employees take email security seriously, you’ll be able to protect the data and operational systems that are crucial to your business.