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Email is one of the easiest ways for bad actors to access your network. Fortunately, there are best practices for securing your email. It’s important to remember that the bad guys only need to get it right once. You must get it right every time; don’t take unnecessary chances.
Best Practices for Securing Your Email
Clear Policies: Get IT and business leaders to formulate clear security policies, including email-specific ones.
Reinforcement: Make email security practices part of employee onboarding, ongoing training, and performance reviews.
Buy-In: Buy-in from non-security peers for the company’s security strategy is crucial to achieving strong security outcomes for SMBs.
Learn from Incidents: Leverage email security incidents to address vulnerabilities and fine-tune policies.
Rapid Incident Response: A companywide incident response plan (including notifications, responsibilities, response and mitigation workflows, reporting, etc.) must be regularly tested and updated.
Data Loss Prevention Program: A DLP program incurs costs, but the ROI is clear when a company can achieve near-zero RPO/RTO outcomes in response to ransomware or other data theft exploits.
Systematic Management of Email Passwords: UK survey: 82% of security breaches over the previous year started with weak email passwords. IT should enforce strong, unique passwords that are updated regularly.
Clear Reporting: Be able to demonstrate diligent tracking of email security metrics and effectively address incidents and vulnerabilities.
Proactively Refreshing Email Security Stack: SMBs with a process for proactively refreshing their security technology stack achieve superior security outcomes.
Two-factor Authentication (2FA) / Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): An additional authentication step considerably hardens email security. There are plenty of free and commercial 2FA solutions available.
Overlapping Layers of Defense: Sophisticated exploits require a multilayer defense that leverages email security gateways, anti-phishing and anti-malware tools, and threat intelligence solutions.
Commonwealth Sentinel is here to help you navigate the ever-evolving and growing cyber security threats we all face. We can evaluate your existing IT security and work with your team to improve it. At Commonwealth Sentinel, we stay focused on cyber security so you can focus on other things. Contact us today or sign up for a free consultation.