What is Email Security? And More

Email security ensures the usability, integrity, and authenticity of email communications by protecting against the risk of email threats.

Email allows billions of connected people and organizations to communicate with each other to send messages. Unfortunately, email is the foundation of how the Internet is uses and has long remain the target of attacks.

Since the early days of email, it has remain abused and misused in various ways, with no shortage of email threats. Email abuse includes:

• phishing attempts
• address spoofing
• spam spoofing
• malware distribution
• Business Email Consensus (BEC)
• Denial of service (DoS) attacks

Email security intends to help prevent attacks and abuse of email communication systems. In the field of email security, there are several email security protocols that technology standards organizations recommend and recommend for implementation to help limit email risks. Protocols can implements by email clients and email servers, such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365, to help ensure the secure transmission of email. Beyond protocols, secure email gateways can help organizations and individuals protect email from various threats.

How Secure is Email?

By default, email is not secure for various reasons. The original implementation of email protocols, including Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Internet Message Access Protocol, and Post Office Protocol 3, did not require using secure transport mechanisms such as the socket layer. Secure (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS). Therefore, connections to and from an email server were not complete through an encrypted tunnel, meaning anyone could read an intercepted message.

Also adding further complexity, email messages are typically stored on email servers in an unencrypt format. System administrators with access to an unencrypted email server could gain access to read any email. Therefore, a user email account can only as secure as the server where the email is stored.

The user side of email is another area that demonstrates its inherent mistrust. Access to users’ email accounts often protects with just a username and password, which is often insufficient to combat modern email threats.

As the volume of data breaches continues to increase, many email credentials have leaked to public sites. Sometimes attackers can easily find user credentials for email services from common data leaks. In addition, brute force and password guessing attacks are also a risk for the username/password approach to email access.

Email insecurity is also due to the lack of guaranteed authenticity. It is possible and common for attackers to spoof an email address. And appear to have received a fake email from a legitimate address. Email inauthenticity is a common tactic uses in phishing attempts and spam phishing attacks, which create a wider net to lure unsuspecting victims into clicking through it.

Why is Email Security Important?

Email is used for business communication and is often a central element of an organization’s IT operations and ability to communicate internally and externally.

An email risk, such as a lack of access due to a DoS attack, can potentially limit a company’s ability to do business. Another major email threat, spam, can adversely affect a business. It including filling your inbox with useless information and potentially leading to phishing attacks. Email can also contain sensitive data, usually only for the recipient of an email message. No security of