Despite its utility in the world of business, email comes with a major risk. For the vast majority of cybersecurity leaders, coming in at 99% of all respondents, email is the most stressful part of the job. Not only does email act as a potential site for attack vectors, but its close dependence on human interaction has led to it becoming a difficult site to manage.
Human error is among the most common reasons for a security breach, with workers’ full control over their email creating a difficult piece of the attack surface to manage. Yet, the risk that email poses has also led to this area having a continual stream of new technical security innovations.
Email security, in all its forms, has dramatically impacted modern cybersecurity practices in business. In this article, we’ll dive into the core email security practices that cybersecurity experts use to keep their businesses safe. We’ll trace their development, usage, and impact on wider cybersecurity practices.
Let’s dive right in.
Why Is Email Security Such an Important Part of Modern Cybersecurity?
The cybersecurity industry is a continual balance between innovation and defensive strategies. Without innovation from cybersecurity firms, businesses would be unable to keep up with the rising cyber threat. The ability to pinpoint new potential entry points for cyber attackers and to create effective solutions for them is vital.
Even with known attacks, like those outlined in the MITRE framework, businesses need to understand exactly how to stop each attack from occurring. Beyond just securing a business, they must teach employees about the correct security practices to follow when interacting with any business-related assets or accounts.
Every business in the world is currently struggling with an expanding attack surface. As we continuously add more tech platforms, software, systems, and components to our stack, we increase the attack surface and make it more likely that a breach will occur. Instead of trying to cover all of the attack surfaces at the same time, cybersecurity teams have to pass off a degree of authority to each worker.
There is no aspect of business where this is more obvious than with email. Email is a central part of business communication, providing an expansive system that lets people get in contact with one another and share messages. While this is an effective communication pathway, it is also heavily responsible for cyber breaches.
For example, around 83% of companies experienced a phishing incident in 2021, with many of these breaches being the direct fault of an employee accidentally giving away information or falling for something they shouldn’t have. Yet, even though so many attacks occur on email, it is far too important to simply substitute for something else.
Even if businesses move to alternative internal communications platforms, like instant messaging, they still have to deal with external comms through email. As an unavoidable and deeply integral part of modern business, email has become a battleground for cybersecurity.
Best Modern Cybersecurity Practices for Email
Businesses use email to share important documents, discuss projects, and communicate with clients. With the sheer value of customer information that passes through email, this is a core area of attack from cybercriminals. In order to create a safe working environment, cybersecurity experts have developed a number of related technologies to protect email.
There are a number of modern cybersecurity tools, systems, and practices that experts now recommend when using email:
- Proxies – Proxies allow employees to keep their location-related data as private as possible. A proxy will prevent any websites they navigate to from tracking their data, helping to reduce the chance of nefarious content from penetrating into your system.
- MFA – Multi-factor authentication, also known as two-factor authentication, is a technology that attaches to email to ensure only the actual user can gain access to their account. Even in the event of breached passwords, MFA can stop unverified accounts from entering a system account as they won’t have a second device to confirm their identity.
- Encrypted Connections – Encryption within emails allows businesses to create a layer of disguise on all outgoing emails. If an email is hijacked, the contents are illegible, as the recipient is the only one who has the ability to decrypt and read the email. This additional layer of security is one of the first things that many business email administrators set up.
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Configuration – An IP verification system that ensures only registered and verified email addresses can send emails to your employees. This helps to reduce the number of potential scam or phishing emails that arrive in email inboxes.
Another common point of vulnerability is when using additional component integrations to email. For example, some email signatures of major clients like iOS Mail, Apple Mail, and Microsoft Outlook were all discovered to have S/MIME email signature verification faults. As many as 14 clients were vulnerable to attacks through this pathway in 2019, with spoofed or real signatures being nearly impossible to discern.
To fix errors like this, it’s vital that cybersecurity experts recommend email components that are verified and have an equal degree of security concerns. For example, when using an exchange server signature manager, businesses are able to comprehensively manage all of their related email signatures while still abiding by security vulnerability concerns.
Without core technologies that can effectively cover potential vulnerabilities, email is simply too risky to use. Fortunately, with the large amount of attention that this field receives, there are ample protective technologies now embedded in leading clients and related technologies.
Final Thoughts
As the average attack surface of each company has grown over the past few years, a comprehensive understanding of modern cybersecurity practices is now vital. Especially on email, which is a high-traffic and high-risk platform, understanding modern recommendations and communicating them to all related parties is more important than ever before.
Email has been a central battleground for modern cybersecurity, with several major vulnerability events compromising the integrity of leading providers. Yet, adapting to these changes has allowed businesses to make their cybersecurity stronger than ever. Both in terms of the dynamic technological inventions that were inspired by security events and the adaptation of the modern workforce to better prepare for these events, email has radically shaped cybersecurity.
As long as businesses rely on email, it will always be a central focus for attackers. By adapting to attacks, launching new security tools, and keeping email as safe as possible, cybersecurity experts can effectively stem the rising tide of cyber attacks and cyber threats.
