Cloud email security: Strengthening your email security posture

Email is the most used form of communication in the business world. With organizations across the world using email for formal communication, it's not surprising that at least 70% of an organization's data is confidential. Because it’s one of the easiest ways to gain access to corporate networks and spread threats, email is a lucrative target for attackers. They can extract confidential organizational information or even extract money by blocking users' access to their email accounts or systems. According to a survey conducted in 2023, phishing emails account for over 90% of all known cyberattacks. With such email attacks on the rise, it becomes imperative for every organization to strengthen their email security.

What is cloud email security?

Email security is the process of deploying essential software to inspect incoming and outgoing email data for threats that could harm the organization's email environment and damage its brand. Cloud email security uses cloud-based software to inspect these emails for any possible threats. 

Cloud email security software provides a multi-layer defense mechanism, which is key to enhancing your security and providing a more comprehensive approach to email security. This is a good way to catch email threats that might slip through cracks in your email provider’s native security. 

Importance of cloud email security

Native email security offered by legacy email providers thwarts basic threats such as spam and basic spoofing attacks. However, attackers are becoming more clever in the kinds of threats they create. Ever-evolving threats such as phishing, spoofing, malware attacks, and zero-day threats can be blocked only with the help of an additional email security solution.

Attackers trying to break through email systems have a full understanding of the native security provided by legacy email providers. The attacks they build are crafted to evade email providers’ built-in security. Cloud email security solutions work on top of providers’ security infrastructure, making cloud email security solutions nearly impenetrable.

Deploying an email security solution also creates a central spot from where you can manage all of your security requirements. You can set up security policies for your organization, keep track of suspicious emails that have been sent to your users, and take the necessary actions all from one place. This ensures faster response and remediation to incoming threats.

Email breaches and their repercussions

Over time, email breaches have grown from simple spam and spoofed emails to more complex attacks. These attacks can broadly be classified into spam, phishing, malware, and novel threats, called zero-day attacks.

Spam

Spam refers to any unsolicited bulk emails sent to users at random. This is one of the most basic email threats, but they can sometimes contain malware or be a source for phishing emails.

Malware

Malware refers to malicious software that has been injected into a genuine-looking email. These emails contain viruses, trojans, bots, or ransomware that could cause disruption to your organzization's systems.

Phishing

Phishing is the type of breach where attackers spoof the identity of a legitimate person or domain to send email. They then try to extract confidential information from the recipient using the impersonated identity.

Zero-day attacks

Zero-day attacks are advanced, never-before-seen threats that penetrate an organization's defenses before the recipients or administrators have a chance to identify the attack and take necessary action.

If an organization faces an email breach, it could lead to deeply impactful repercussions.

1. The financial and monetary losses organizations experience can include fines imposed by regulatory boards, compensation for affected parties, legal fees, and more.

2. The brand’s reputation takes a hit because customers no longer feel safe to trust the brand; word of mouth about the breach can consequentially affect potential customers' decisions.

3. If the attackers end up deleting or leaking sensitive data, the impact of losing such data could lead to significant business disruption.

4. During a data breach, your organization's users might be locked out of their email systems, leading to downtime and a situation where you can no longer conduct business until the systems are back up and running.

Customers affected by the data breach might pursue legal action if a failure of regulatory compliance comes to light, which might lead to heavy fines.

Features of cloud email security solutions

Spam filtering

Email security solutions analyze the intent and content of an email to identify whether it could be spam. These solutions have a global list of spam senders and can verify if the email is from one of the known spam-sending domains or email addresses.

Anti-virus/malware protection

Incoming emails are scanned for viruses or any malicious software that might be present in the email content, attachments, or URLs through built-in antivirus software. Incoming attachments and URLs can be sandboxed to investigate malicious software in a test environment.

Anti-phishing

Emails that nudge recipients to divulge sensitive information may be missed by native email security filters but are identified by cloud email security solutions. Advanced threats such as spear phishing and business email compromise are also thwarted.

Spoof control

When hackers send emails posing as a legitimate domain or email address, cloud email security solutions identify these emails by authentication mechanisms such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and allow only the emails that aren’t tampered with to pass through to recipients' mailboxes.

Zero-day threat protection

Native email security filters can prepare for known attacks, but an additional email security solution can provide protection from novel zero-day attacks. This is done by sandboxing suspicious emails, testing them for threats in a secure environment, and taking the next course of action.

Custom policy enforcement

While all of these protection mechanisms are built into an email security solution by default, each administrator knows what's best for their organization. Email security solutions provide the ability to customize these features to suit their requirements and prepare for threats they might expect.

Improving your email security

Cloud email security solutions provide ample security measures to protect your organization from malicious emails. However, it's the shared responsibility of email administrators and employees to follow certain security protocols to help secure their data and prevent that data from ending up in the wrong hands.

Here are a few security measures that administrators and employees can take to ensure compliance and utmost protection for all members in the organization.

Look out for suspicious emails

It's best practice to stay ahead of emails that look suspicious. These may come from an unknown sender, with either a vague subject line or a catchy one, offering something if the email is opened, or a subject line that proclaims a shocking piece of news.

Check for possible spoofs in the email address or the domain from which the email is sent. Attackers might try to impersonate someone within the organization, such as the CEO or other C-level executives, or even a reputable client, to prompt employees into divulging important information.

Be vigilant when opening attachments or links

Most native email security solutions can spot suspicious email content. Instead of including threats in the email content, attackers try to inject threats in the attachments or the URLs included in the email. While email providers warn against attachments that cannot be scanned, some attachments may slip through the provider’s scanning mechanism.

It’s also prudent to block certain attachment types, such as .exe, .php, and .vbs, among others. These attachment types can be common carriers of viruses or other malware. Employees can request clearance for certain attachments that may be important on a case-by-case basis.

Email recipients should also be wary of suspicious-looking links. Links shortened using URL shorteners should be clicked on with utmost care. These links may lead to websites that look legitimate at first, but phish for important information. Credential harvesting and bank frauds are some of the common consequences of URL scams.

Enforce strict password policies

Mandate a strict password policy for all users in your organization. In your email provider, set up a password policy that enforces the use of a mix of letters in upper and lowercase, numbers, and special characters.

In the password policy, mandate a password change every few months. This will help ensure that your employees don't fall prey to credential stuffing attacks, which make use of passwords leaked during a data breach. Advise your employees against using common passwords or passwords that might be based on commonly known personal information such as birthdays, spouse's name, street addresses, and more.

Ensure email encryption

When choosing your email provider, make sure you check the level of encryption it provides for your emails. It's good practice for emails to be encrypted both in transit and at rest. This ensures that the emails aren’t intercepted and viewed or modified in transit. Some common email encryption methodologies include PGP, S/MIME, and TLS.

Enable two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication is the process of ensuring two layers of security before logging into your email accounts. You’ll have to enter your password as your first step, and then enter a verification code sent to your mobile device as the second step.

The second step of security can be some other method, such as scanning a QR code from a provider-specific mobile app or entering a backup code to log in to your email account. This method ensures that even if there’s a password leak, a secondary layer of security protects your account from unauthorized access.

Email security awareness trainings

All of these security measures should be conveyed to your employees through structured security awareness training.

Your employees are the first ones to come in contact with suspicious emails. Most attackers target employees by sending phishing emails and BEC attacks posing to be someone else. Every employee with an email account must be trained in the best cybersecurity practices to ensure that they're aware of the prevailing threats.

Employees must also be educated about possible visual cues to identify phishing and spoofed emails. They need to understand that these emails must be reported as spam so that the administrator can take action to configure spam policies.

It's prudent to conduct more advanced training for high-profile employees in the organization because their email accounts usually contain critical information, making them susceptible to a higher risk of impersonation by attackers.

Deploy a cloud email security solution

While the email security best practices discussed here can thwart attacks on your email environment to an extent, deploying a cloud email security solution reinforces and strengthens the protection on your email accounts. An email security software will act as an intermediary layer, filtering suspicious emails or warning recipients about plausible threats in an email.

eProtect is one such cloud-based email security and archiving solution that provides an additional layer of security for email accounts. The solution offers advanced threat detection mechanisms that can secure on-premise and cloud email accounts from evolving email threats. eProtect is the security solution powering Zoho Mail, a platform trusted by millions of users.