There are few enterprise vulnerabilities like email. While it has been a common channel for productivity over the years, email tends to be ineffective in the large doses that many businesses users experience on a daily basis. But in addition to being poorly organized in many instances, email has long been a consistent opportunity for data loss and cybercrime to occur.
"In today's security landscape, email threats are one of the most common strategies utilized among cyber criminals," wrote eSecurity Planet contributor Fred Touchette. "Much of the early spam traffic was annoying and essentially amounted to junk mail that consumed you and your company's time. However, it wasn't long before cyber criminals began using such messages to deliver far more destructive content."
With this in mind, organizations need to start laying down significant restrictions on email cybersecurity. But the problem with this is that many offices have nurtured a significant reliance on email that is not easily weaned off of. The solution will be to implement effective alternatives that employees are eager to use. One such way to accomplish this is to invest in cloud-based faxing. Cloud-based fax is a secure email software that helps to improve email cybersecurity without compromising the mobility that has kept email near the top of the communications food chain.
Scams are constant, evolving
One of the biggest problems with email is how easy it is for business scammers to craft an official-looking message. Implying that the email carries something of consequence is enough to get victims clicking on unfamiliar links without a second thought. This happens to personal and professional accounts constantly and indiscriminately.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to pose as a company claiming to have a shipment or package ready for the sender. Curiosity often gets the best of people in these instances, leading them to click an accompanying link and inadvertently downloading malware. The only defense against this kind of thing – short of eliminating email use in the office – is to tell employees to stay on their guard, but this is impossible to guarantee.
With the holiday season coming up, this can be an especially powerful threat to security – namely if employees are using their work emails to track packages they're expecting for Christmas.
"Seasonal scams like these are a perennial scourge of the holidays, mainly because the methods they employ are reliably successful," wrote security expert Brian Krebs. "Crooks understand that it's easier to catch would-be victims off-guard during the holidays. This goes even for people who generally know better than to click on links and attachments in emails that spoof trusted brands and retailers, because this is a time of year when many people are intensely focused on making sure their online orders arrive before Dec. 25."
Cutting down on emails increases security, productivity
The best way to defend against these threats is to push email as far out of the workplace as possible. While it's not very likely that email will be totally eradicated, it only makes sense to provide as many new assets as possible to curb its use. In terms of sending and receiving documents, cloud-based fax is a powerful alternative to email attachments, which alone in themselves are another popular tool for hackers and other cybercriminals. Cloud-based fax reduces the chance that someone will start a malware download when they think they're opening a spreadsheet from the finance department. Remember, creating a convincing email scam is relatively easy for business scammers, and finding ways to disable the channel will help organizations stay safe and productive.
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