This article focuses on explaining what email security is, some of the best practices for developing an email delivery infrastructure, and an overview of some types of attacks on email systems.
Email Security Definition
Email security is the process of protecting email communication in the transmission and storage of private, personal, and commercial information sent through email.
It includes content filtering, antivirus software, and encryption algorithms to ensure data privacy, while at the same time preventing loss or unauthorized access.
Email security best practices are a set of recommended strategies that can help protect electronic communications, such that their intended content is not compromised or altered.
There are three main categories within which to think about after you know what is email security: digital (scalable), physical (modifiable), and procedural.
a. Digital – It involves making sure your emails are encrypted in transit and that they can’t be read by unauthorized parties.
b. Physical – This type of security is used when you need to lock down a particular piece of data, such as an email message or attachment. The goal here is to prevent anyone from changing or deleting the content of the stored file. To do this, we might use a password or code that only individuals with access rights can access.
c. Procedural – It’s about making sure that people who have permission can view or change information in the email system without having malicious intent towards the company itself or its customers.
Why is Email Security important?
Email security is important for several reasons:
Confidentiality: Email often contains sensitive information, such as personal or financial data, or business secrets, and it is essential to protect this information from unauthorized access. Without adequate email security measures in place, such information could be easily intercepted and compromised.
Integrity: Email messages can be tampered with during transmission, making it possible for someone to modify the content of the message without the sender or recipient knowing about it. Ensuring the integrity of email ensures that messages remain unaltered during transmission.
Availability: Email security is also important to ensure that email systems remain available and usable. Email systems can be targeted by attackers, and without proper security measures in place, they can be disrupted, resulting in downtime, lost productivity, and potential data loss.
Compliance: Many industries and organizations are subject to various regulations and compliance standards that require them to protect sensitive information. Implementing email security measures can help meet these compliance requirements and avoid costly fines and penalties.
Email Security Protocols
Standard email protocols, such as SMTP and POP3, were originally implemented to allow for a reliable exchange of messages between systems.
However, there’s no standard for the use of secure transport mechanisms (such as SSL and TLS) in a standard email protocol field. They do not specify any connection types at all. Although this may seem like a small detail, it can have large implications on the security of your data and its integrity.
This means if you send an email between two systems that are not using SSL or TLS, that communication could potentially be intercepted by an attacker without you knowing it. This could mean sensitive information being read in plain text or compromised passwords being sent over unencrypted channels.
For example, when you send an email using SMTP over port 25, your message travels through the Internet and then is sent to a server on your network. If someone intercepts it, they can read it without any encryption.
Another issue is that with standard protocols your emails are stored in an unencrypted format on email servers. This means that anyone with access to the server (for example, a system administrator) can read the email. It also means that if the server gets compromised, all of your emails could be exposed to hackers.
In addition, most protocols on the user side of email are unfortunately not secure. Most protocols rely on simple username/password combinations which can be bypassed via advanced social engineering attacks.
Therefore, standard email protocols are insecure due to their failure to account for man-in-the-middle attacks, which is the type of attack that occurs when an attacker with the ability to intercept and modify traffic between two parties (such as your computer and the server you’re trying to communicate with) sits between those two systems and alters it to show something that wasn’t sent or received.
Email Security Best Practices
Email security is a crucial part of your online business. If you don’t have an email security measure, you could be putting yourself at risk for cyber-attacks and data theft.
Fortunately, there are several email security practices. Each one of these practices has its way of protecting your mailing information and keeping it secure from prying eyes.
These practices include encryption, which protects your messages from being read by anyone who might intercept them as they travel across the network; and authentication, which verifies that the person on the other end of the message is who they say they are.
Spam Filters
Spam is a type of unsolicited email that often includes harmful or deceptive content. Spam can be sent by :
- Spammers, who are trying to sell you products or services
- Scammers, who are trying to steal your information and use it for financial gain;
- “Black hat” hackers, who are looking for vulnerabilities in your system that they can exploit to access your data and cause other problems.
Spam filters are designed to identify and block unwanted emails. This is accomplished by examining the content of an email and looking for certain patterns. When a spam filter identifies a message as spam, it will prevent it from being sent to the recipient’s inbox.
There are many different types of spam filters available, including:
- Blacklist-based filters that check messages against a list of known spammer addresses
- Keyword-based filters that check messages based on keywords or phrases
- Anomaly-based filters that look for potentially malicious content in messages
- Heuristic-based filters that perform a combination of other types of analysis to determine whether or not a message is a spam
Anti-Virus Protection
Viruses are one of the biggest threats to email security today. They can infect an entire network by corrupting files, stealing passwords and personal data, or spreading themselves across multiple systems through infected attachments sent through email. These viruses can wreak havoc on your company’s email servers and applications if they’re not detected quickly enough.
The best way to protect your emails is by implementing anti-virus protection systems within the email server. An anti-virus system checks all incoming emails for viruses, worms, and Trojan horses.
Email Attachment Control
Phishing emails are designed to trick people into giving up their personal information by clicking on a link in an email. The attachment to these emails often contains malicious software that could let the scammers access your computer and collect your banking information.
The best way to protect yourself from phishing attacks is by using an email attachment control system. These systems allow you to see what type of files are being sent to your inbox before they are opened by you or someone else on your team. They also help you verify whether or not the file was sent from the sender’s address before allowing it through security filters like antivirus software or spam filters.
Email Encryption
Unencrypted emails are also vulnerable to hackers because they can be easily deciphered. This means that if someone were to intercept an unencrypted email, they could read it without having to use a password or key. Encrypting emails ensures that only the intended recipient can read them, making them more secure from hackers.
Email data encryption works by scrambling data so it becomes indecipherable without a special key. This means that even if someone steals an email from your server and reads it, they will not be able to make sense of what’s in the email without having access to the key needed to decrypt it—and only the intended recipient would have that key.
Learn how to encrypt email.
Email Security Protocols: DMARC, SPF & DKIM
Even if you know what is email security and how important it is for your business; you may still fall short of providing optimum security. That’s when DMARC, a next-generation email security protocol for businesses, schools, and corporate organizations comes in. It is an advanced security mechanism designed to protect businesses against email spoofing. If you want to secure your email communications, DMARC is the most efficient tool for this purpose.
By implementing DMARC, you can ensure that all of the emails are sent from the domain (or legitimate recipient) you want them to be delivered from.
DMARC uses two other technologies, SPF and DKIM, as well to work together as a powerful whole.
SPF identifies where an email came from by checking the IP address of the sending server against a list of authorized servers for your domain.
DKIM creates a digital signature inside the message header. The signature is verified by checking against a public key that’s stored on the sender and recipient’s servers each. Therefore, it provides another layer of security by checking if someone has ownership over the domain they are sending the email from or if they are just trying to impersonate a legitimate sender.
Benefits of using Email Security Services
DMARC is a modern email security solution that uses Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) standards to reduce the risk of phishing and malware in your emails.
It works by sending a special header when an email is sent that identifies the sender, adds additional features to improve email security, and allows you to set up an effective response if someone attempts to send phishing or malware-tainted messages through your account. It does this using a series of checks and balances based on information about the sender, recipient, subject line, body text, and other specific characteristics of each message.
The DMARC protocol requires each message to carry an authentication tag, which is an identifier for the sender domain. If the recipient of an email does not have access to that tag, then the recipient machine will not be able to verify whether or not the message came from a legitimate source.
How DMARC Levels Up Email Security?
DMARC is the best email security solution because it’s built on a foundation of strong authentication, trusted third parties, and a rules-based policy.
The result is that DMARC provides you with a solid foundation for managing your email communications, while also giving you the ability to set up complex policies that allow you to manage your messages even if they’re coming from untrusted sources.
Here is how DMARC spruces up email security:
1. One of the most prominent features that make DMARC different from other email security solutions is that it looks at the metadata of the email (such as who it was sent from). Therefore, it does not only prevent spam or phishing attacks. But also authenticates messages before they are sent and ensures only legitimate recipients can receive them.
2. It’s effective because it works on both the source side (the content of the emails, including attachments) and the target side (the inbox of the recipients).
3. It uses a variety of methods to identify suspicious messages, including IP addresses and DNS lookup data, which means that it doesn’t rely on a single point of failure like other solutions do.
4. DMARC works by identifying suspicious emails, then blocking them from reaching their intended recipients. It uses a variety of methods to identify suspicious messages, including IP addresses and DNS lookup data, which means that it doesn’t rely on a single point of failure like other solutions do.
5. DMARC works with all types of email providers and can be implemented for both small businesses and large enterprises. It’s also very easy to customize, meaning you can adjust its policies (like p=reject or p=none) that match specific types of emails with different actions based on their content.
Email Security with PowerDMARC
No matter how much you train your employees to use email securely, security breaches are inevitable. If your company is one of the many that have been hacked, it can be hard to know where to start when it comes to fixing the security hole.
Therefore, you should consider using PowerDMARC’s Dmarc managed services. Our team of experts has been working for decades in the field of data security, and we know what it takes to protect against the latest attacks.
- Using our DMARC configuration service, you’re able to configure your email server so that it rejects messages from unverified senders.
- This helps keep your servers secure from hackers who would try to get into them by sending out malicious emails.
- This will also help protect your customer’s data from being stolen by hackers because it will prevent them from impersonating your brand.
With DMARC configured properly, all of these email security problems will go away, so you can focus on what matters: building better relationships with customers.
- How to Fix “The DNS record type 99 (SPF) Has Been Deprecated”? - March 9, 2023
- SPF DKIM DMARC: The Foundational Elements of Email Authentication - March 9, 2023
- What is a Brute Force Attack and How Does it Work? - March 9, 2023
