Essential Email Policies Your Company Should Have
As a company, one of the key tools you use to communicate is usually email. Email is extremely popular as you can access it everywhere, and most employees know how to use different email systems instantly. Unfortunately, with all great things, there can be downsides. One downside to emails is that it can cause some security risks. Some hackers look for security flaws within the system and use the access to steal certain information from you.
As a business, it is important to educate your employees about potential risks, which is why we have put together five essential email policies your company should have.
1. Educate Employees About Phishing Attacks
A phishing attack is a very common attack that over the years has become more sophisticated. You’ll often find you receive regular phishing attacks in your junk folder. But new attacks are harder for spam filters in emails to pick up. When these reach your official email folder, this is when you want to be aware of it and take the necessary precautions.
The way a phishing attack often works is the perpetrator represents themselves as a person of importance that will entice you to read the email. Then, within the body of the email, there will be a link that looks legitimate but is actually a virus that will attack your company’s system.
It is important you educate employees about these attacks. Make them aware of certain signs like the domain being misspelt, a poorly written email or a link is sent from a public domain.
2. Enabled MFA Password Protection
Passwords are the a frustration in many people’s lives. With many new application launches, personal, and business accounts, there are so many passwords to remember that it is easy to forget them. Whenever you forget your password, the logical response is to click a password reset where your new password link is sent to you. If your email address has been hacked and the perpetrator has access to your email, then they also have access to your other accounts within the business.
As a company, it is important you make sure you have multi-factor authentication enabled on your email accounts. By implementing this policy, it requires an employee to have a second way of verifying themselves when forgetting a password. This could be in a way of a text message or fingerprint verification on the phone. If a hacker manages to get past the first step of your security, they won’t be able to get past the second as they won’t have access to that information, making it harder to infiltrate your business.
3. Make Sure You Have End-to-End Encryption
Once area of your email security to check on is that all your email communications are secure and have end-to-end encryption. If in the unfortunate scenario your system does get hacked, by having end-to-end encryption, you can feel rest assured that the perpetrators are unable to do anything with the data they have received, rendering it useless to them.
If you aren’t familiar with the level of encryption you’re currently using, it may be worth considering getting in an IT expert to check your system and make sure it’s secure and difficult for hackers to get in. Find a MSP in Edmond, OK who can provide expert IT security consultation.
4. Strip Out the Metadata
If you keep the metadata within your emails, the people receiving them will be able to find out information about your company within the headers where it’s stored. Information they will be able to gather includes things like your network, browser use, or your computer information. If this is in the wrong hands, it could give private, confidential information to people you don’t want receiving it. By implementing email security, your security software will strip out this information, stopping it getting to the wrong people.
If you don’t have any security on your emails, hackers may potentially intercept your email and know key things about your business such as your clients, suppliers or purchases. This information may allow them to attack you with a phishing scam that would look realistic as they would know certain information about you. Either that or they may choose to leak your information online causing additional problems.
5. Have a Password Policy
One strong defense against email attacks is to have a password policy in place. You will find that many employees will use easy to guess passwords and the same password for multiple accounts as this makes logging into things quicker. This is true especially when most people have many logins for different systems.
By having a password policy that requires them to enter a password that is strong and hard to guess, this makes a hacker’s job that much more difficult. That said, this will normally lead to employees resetting their password a lot, so make sure you have multi-factor authentication enabled, to make your system even more secure.
