Why is email security important?
Regardless of your field of activity, email plays a major role in your company's communication. Every day, more than 333 billion emails are sent and received by businesses to customers and suppliers, by employees to their managers, and from one colleague to another. Several reasons explain the prevalence of emails over other communication methods, but the use of this effective professional communication tool nevertheless represents an opportunity for cybercriminals who use various forms of attacks to steal valuable information from companies.
Most cyberattacks (94%) begin with a malicious email. Cybercrime cost more than $4.1 billion in 2020, with business email compromise causing the most damage, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The consequences can be severe, resulting in significant financial, data, and reputational losses.
Adopt best practices in terms of security for
emails.
In response to the rapidly evolving email threat landscape, organizations have established email security best practices to support communication and protect against threats. Email security best practices include:
Educating employees with periodic training to minimize the risk of human error, and ensuring that employees — often considered the first line of defense for an organization — understand the importance of email security.
Investing in user awareness training so they can learn to recognize the signs of a phishing attack and other indicators of malicious intent.
Transitioning to an email security solution that offers advanced threat protection.
Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) to prevent account compromise. Requiring users to provide multiple ways to log in to accounts is a simple way to secure organizational data.
Reviewing protections against business email compromise attacks through methods such as spoofing and impersonation.
Moving high-risk processes and transactions to systems with enhanced authentication.