Email continuity services help ensure that email messages are always delivered to the intended recipients even if there is a temporary disruption in email delivery from one provider to another.

According to recent phishing statistics, 96% of phishing attacks arrive by email, specifically through email attachments and external links. And 75% of organizations worldwide have reported having experienced some form of phishing attack in 2020.

The problem is that even if you do everything right with your email security, external senders or recipients can leak your emails accidentally or deliberately. This can happen when working with third parties, such as a breached tech provider, an angry business partner, or even your accountant working in an unsafe system.

However, there's no reason to cancel all your partnerships with third-party providers, especially since their service may prove to be essential to your operations. Still, you should remain vigilant and develop a plan to protect your emails and employees, and monitor your third parties.

Things you should reconsider including in your emails

An alarming 88% of data breach cases occur due to human error. Therefore, your employees pose the highest risk of introducing phishing emails into your organization.

With employees being the biggest targets of phishing emails because of their historical carelessness, they’re also the ones most likely to commit email-related mistakes, like sending emails to the wrong email address. Therefore, it’s crucial to train your employees about the mistakes they may make that may accidentally leak confidential data. Here are things that should never be included in work-related emails:

Personal business

Not only is conducting personal business during business hours considered unethical, but gossiping, joking, and criticizing colleagues or superiors can inadvertently leak private company information. Not only can these emails easily circulate by accident. Hackers may even end up with those emails, release them, and ruin your company’s reputation. When clients and customers hear about internal disputes or complaints, it will lower their trust in your organization.

Private data

Your personal and private data can make you the target of identity theft. Cybercriminals can also use it to trick you into believing that the email you’ve received is from a legitimate source. To protect yourself, don’t include any of the following in a work-related email: Passwords and other login credentials, Social security number, Credit card information, Bank details.

Email attachments

Email attachments can lead to accidental leakages of sensitive files. An alternative to email attachments is share links, which, unlike email attachments, have the option for security features. Share links also allow the ability to track who opens them and set an expiration on when they can be accessed. Most importantly, access to share links can be revoked; but once you send out an email, it cannot be retrieved, and the recipient will have the email attachment for as long as they wish.

Crafting a plan to monitor your third parties

To approach and manage third-party risk, your organization should craft a third-party risk management program. The framework should be based on third-party relationships, legal and regulatory requirements, and assessed levels of risk. Remember to List all third-party vendor relationships and properly address their domains and senders in your email security systems. Watch out for their DMARC records and other liabilities and establish a contingency plan for events such as data breaches.

Source: Anubis Networks

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