How to Defend Against Email Security Threats

11 Apr 2019 IT Services

Knowing how to defend against email security threats can help protect your business from falling victim to cybercriminals. The team of IT professionals from Express Computers want to help you implement some simple procedures for defending your business from email security threats and potential cyberattacks. That is why they have put together a list of common email security threats and how to defend against them.

1. Phishing Attacks

Email phishing attacks are designed to trick the recipient into opening an email to click on a malicious link or open an infected attachment. Since phishing attacks tend to come from authentic-looking email addresses, certain types of phishing attacks—spear phishing and whaling—can often convince employees that are receiving an email from someone inside the company or from a high-level executive, causing them to treat the email with a higher level of urgency.

The best way to protect your business from phishing attacks is to ensure your network software is up to date and to train employees on what to look for before clicking on any links or downloading any files. Keeping your company software up to date will help prevent phishing attacks that use malware to infect your machine, while properly training employees will help ensure that they think twice before opening any potentially suspicious emails.

2. Ransomware

Ransomware attacks are designed to block authorized access to a computer system until the business pays the demanded ransom. Most ransomware attacks today use social engineering to convince the user to open a malicious attachment in an email and to create a sense of dread over what will happen if the ransom is not paid.

While the first step in protecting your business against ransomware is training employees to not open suspicious emails, backing up your business’ important data on the cloud or external servers can be a great preventative measure. Having a backup of all your important business data means you can avoid paying the ransom to get your files back because you will already have extra copies stored elsewhere.

3. Domain Name Spoofing

Domain name spoofing works be changing the domain name in an embedded URL to another URL that looks almost identical. This type of email security threat is most commonly used for identity theft, as it tricks users into believing that they are logging into a secure site when they are actually logging into a site designed to look identical to the one they actually want to log into.

While domain name spoofing can be incredibly difficult to detect by eye, detection software can be installed on your computer network to help prevent bogus links from being clicked on by warning users when they are about to navigate a fake site.

If you would like to learn more about how to defend against email security threats, or if you are interested in IT services, please contact Express Computers at 604-888-7904 or request a consultation online.