Email Threat Protection – Methods to protect your Business
In a previous article we wrote about how to protect your business from malicious email attachments. Today, we’ll be looking at additional methods you can put into place to minimise the risk of installing email threat malware onto your business IT systems.
How email malware could harm your business
Once the malware has made it on to your business systems, it can be difficult to notice until it’s all too late. The impacts that malware can have on your business can be devastating. Here are five ways in which malware could harm your business:
- It could access sensitive data such as passwords, online banking information, employee bank details, or sales information (e.g. credit card details).
- It could gain access to your website, blog, or social media channels and post malicious, spam, or derogatory content.
- It could erase or wipe your computer hard drive which can be disastrous – particularly if it’s not regularly backed up.
- It could send out spam emails (possibly also containing malware threats) to all of your clients and customers.
- It could scrape details about all of your customers or email subscribers which could then be sold on for profit or published online to show the world how insecure your company is – that sort of damage to your reputation is hard to recover.
10 ways to protect your inbox from email threats
- Don’t open email attachments from people that you don’t know or recognize.
- Be wary of ‘official’ looking emails that you aren’t expecting, for example from HMRC, PayPal, eBay – they may be malicious emails send from cybercriminals in the hope of obtaining your passwords or other sensitive information.
- Never open .exe file attachments and be very wary of unfamiliar file types such as .js files
- Delete chain emails and other spam from your inbox. Never reply to them or forward them on to colleagues or friends.
- Never give out passwords, credit card details, or otherwise sensitive information over email.
- Virus scan email attachments or files downloaded from the internet before you open them.
- Install advanced email threat protection such as Spambrella to help identify and remove threats, protect your business users inbox’ and backup your emails regularly preferably using a secure multi-redundant cloud archive.
- Apply inbound policy filters to control content either by keyword, phrase/subject, or attachment.
- Block inbound email from countries you do not have a business interest.
- Stay up to date with the latest email spoofing phishing and whaling attack developments if you are not using a service like Spambrella to protect your business users.
Don’t risk losing your business to cybercriminals. Find out more about Spambrella’s advanced threat protection or contact our sales team to discuss how Spambrella can benefit your business.
