How to Keep Your Email Secure

Unfortunately, email is the most commonly leveraged communication tool among cyber-criminals. They often exploit email to deploy ransomware and spread malware in a bid to compromise professional and personal data by manipulating email users to divulge confidential information. The end game is to steal users’ sensitive data, which may sometimes be disastrous for them or their businesses.

Nowadays, everyone needs tomake email security a top priority. This largely involves a range of measures to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of email communications. It can help you ensure the privacy of sensitive information in your email account and prevent unauthorized access that can potentially result in data breaches. 

Email security also helps detect and block malicious content transmitted by email. Understanding how to keep your email secure will go a long way in helping you ensure email security.

Common Email Security Risks

The following are the most common security threats faced by email users:

Phishing Scams and Social Engineering

Phishing scams/attacks involve the distribution of emails that appear to come from credible sources or brands and are aimed at tricking unsuspecting email users into disclosing sensitive information. 

On the contrary, such emails are sent by scammers who often employ social engineering to breach access to people’s sensitive information. The emails sometimes come as urgent requests and are targeted at exploiting potential victims’ psychological vulnerabilities. 

In most cases, they deceive recipients of such emails to download a malicious attachment or click on a suspicious link typically designed to steal confidential data, including private and financial information.

Weak Passwords and Reused Credentials

Using weak passwords or reusing passwords used across other online accounts as email passwords seriously threatens email security. This is because cybercriminals now leverage automated tools to methodically guess passwords for email accounts with commonly used or weak passwords. This is known as brute force attacks where hacktivists also prey on emails with weak passwords by using a small string of guessed, common passwords against many email accounts to avoid being detected.

Unsecured Wi-Fi and Network Vulnerabilities

Accessing one’s email over public, unsecured Wi-Fi networks without other protection measures poses a severe threat to email security. When this happens, cybercriminals may position themselves to intercept and/or monitor email communication between two parties, during which they analyze patterns. 

Unfortunately, none of the parties in the communication would realize they are being monitored until malicious actors launch a big attack using compromised data.

Inadequate Account Recovery Methods

Not having adequate recovery options set up on an email account is risky and invites account takeover by unauthorized persons. With poor recovery practices, a cybercriminal can access a person’s email account through leaked passwords and pose as the real account owner. 

In most scenarios, once a cybercriminal gains access to a person’s email account, especially if the account has little or no protection measures, they change the login credentials. They can also modify the recovery options and block the actual owner from accessing that account.

How Do You Keep Your Email Secure?

There are several go-to strategies that you can use to protect yourself from email fraud and the inconvenience of getting flooded by spam. They include:

• Select a Strong Password: This seems like an obvious recommendation, but in a world of too many passwords, many people opt for simpler options that can be more easily hacked. Ideally, your password should be very hard to guess or hack. It helps to have a long password with a mix of capital and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. 

Some email accounts require certain criteria for passwords, which they will implement for users for this reason. Whether your email service has these mandates or not, consider choosing a phrase for your password that no one would guess, and then write it out using a mix of the character types mentioned above. For example, “WhatsLOVEgot2doW/it?” or “AnotherOneB1tesTheDu5t!” are both excellent passwords in terms of security and are easy to remember because they correlate with song lyrics.

• Using Built-In Spam Filtering: Your inbox is smarter than you think! Email services have spam filter settings, allowing your junk emails to go to a separate junk folder. They identify junk emails by the number of recipients on the email, keywords, and the sender’s server settings. 

Then, they filter these emails away from your inbox but keep them for you to scan at your convenience before deleting them after some time – usually thirty days. These settings are the default but can easily be modified should you have different preferences. You should use some form of built-in spam filtering to avoid your inbox becoming too crowded and accidentally clicking into a fraudulent email.

• Blocking Spam Email Senders: Once you spot a spam email in your inbox, most email services give you the option of blocking all emails from the sender at the click of a button.
• Be Careful When Using Public Wi-Fi: Additional security threats exist when using public Wi-Fi networks rather than private ones. If you must log in to your email using public W-Fi, use a virtual private network (VPN) to hide all transmissions, notably passwords.
• Protecting your Email Address and Unsubscribing from Spam Emails: One of the most effective ways to protect yourself from fraudulent emails is to be judicious about sharing your email address. This will reduce the spam emails you receive but will not eliminate them. When you see emails that you believe to be spam, you can unsubscribe from them via the sender or through your email account.
• Use Common Sense When Navigating Your Inbox: Statistics show that the most effective weapon against phishing emails is common sense and being attentive to actions you take that pertain to your emails. Use common sense when assessing whether to open an email and never click links from unknown senders. 

When receiving emails from senders, you know, such as an online shopping website you frequent or a government agency, ask yourself if the request being sent is reasonable or suspect. Make calls to verify such emails.

• Utilize an External Security Professional Service for Email: If your email service’s built-in features are not enough to keep your email secure, consider getting an external service that works with your email by utilizing special filtering and firewalls of suspect emails. These are almost always paid services, and often, businesses invest in them to keep organizational email accounts safe. Individuals can utilize these services for personal email as well.
• Use Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Using two-factor authentication on your email account adds an extra layer of security if your password gets compromised. You can do so by enabling another verification method and a regular email account password. For instance, you may use a mobile app or choose text message as a secondary verification when you sign in to your email account.
• Consider Changing Your Email Password Regularly and Reviewing Security Settings Periodically: Regularly changing your email password can help prevent compromise and protect email accounts. However, make sure not to reuse an old password when changing it. In addition, periodically reviewing your email security settings will help you ensure they are configured correctly in a way that can prevent data compromise.

In this modern world, we must balance the convenience of real-time electronic communication with a diligent approach to personal and business cybersecurity. If individuals and organizations continuously educate themselves about cyber threats and implement the above tips, they can stay ahead of most, if not all, email threats and keep their inboxes secure.

Why Monitoring Your Email is Important

Active email monitoring is essential in ensuring email security and tracking email activity for unauthorized or unusual access (or attempts). For most companies, it involves analyzing email servers and looking up email transmissions to prevent security-related issues and protect their customers.

Proactively monitoring email accounts can help a business identify potential threats and mitigate risks associated with such threats. This will help them maintain a secure digital environment and stay ahead of potential threats. Similarly, actively monitoring an email account can prevent an individual from knowingly or unknowingly divulging personal or financial information to cybercriminals. 

You can do any of the following to proactively monitor your email and ensure email security for personal or professional purposes:

Use Tools to Track Unusual Activity

Using email monitoring solutions like InfoTracer’s Email Lookup can help you determine if your email has been previously flagged for unauthorized or suspicious activity. 

Similarly, with any of these monitoring tools, you can quickly look up an unusual email account that sends you a malicious-looking email. This can help you determine if that email account is associated with any online profile that may pose a privacy risk or other potential threats to your email security. 

Once you identify an email account as malicious, you can mark it as spam, and no communication from it will reach your inbox.

Set Up Alerts for Account Access

To ensure email security, virtually all email providers offer built-in features that notify users of unusual account access from new locations or devices. Configuring your email account to send you email notifications of such activities primarily serves the purpose of email monitoring and can help prevent unauthorized access to your account. 

Knowing how to keep your email secure is essential for the overall protection of sensitive data, including your confidential private and financial information. To ensure email security, you can enable the 2FA on your email, implement strong passwords, unsubscribe from spam emails, change your password periodically, and avoid accessing your email over an unsecured network. In addition, using an email monitoring solution can help secure your email.