Securing Email

Email is one of the fastest ways into your organization for cyber criminals. That’s today’s topic in our on-going series 15 Ways To Protect Your Business From A Cyber Attack. Protecting your inbox and those of your employees is a key component in any good cyber defense strategy.  If you’re using Office365/Outlook for your email, you will certainly want some companion products to help bolster your defenses.  Google Workspace has some sophisticated defenses built in, but even Workspace can benefit from additional tools.

Today’s defensive tools break down into chiefly two categories: Gateways and API.  Secure eMail Gateways (SEGs) rely on being a first stop on an email’s way into your organization.  To use them, you literally direct all traffic to your email system to the Gateway first, so it can evaluate whether or not to forward the email on to your inbox, perhaps your SPAM folder, or even to hold it off to the side for security personnel to review.  This is an effective approach, and most SEGs use artificial intelligence to get better and better at discerning what is and is not spam coming into your organization.  

Another advantage of a Secure eMail Gateway is that it can be used to monitor outbound traffic as well. This is especially helpful in regulated organizations to help ensure emails containing protected information are not sent without encryption, for instance.  Other types of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) techniques can be implemented through such gateways as well.

Google Workspace has console controls to emulate common functions of an email gateway, including DLP, anti-phishing and SPAM filtering, and they can be very effective. Office365 users typically add a security product to get these features, as they are not native to Exchange.  When I was a CIO I wanted to use a company to test how well our employees were able to detect and avoid phishing attacks. One company I considered for this testing said their fake phishing attacks wouldn’t get through Google’s anti-phising filters. They’d tried a few strategies and couldn’t manage to avoid triggering Google’s built-in alarms. 

One of the key reasons to move from just a gmail account (person@gmail.com) to a Workspace account is that you get access to these types of controls to improve upon the baseline of public gmail accounts. Workspace has the added benefit of allowing users to mark email as trusted, phishing, or SPAM directly in the email client, to help the AI algorithms get better over time.

Another approach, though, is to use the email provider’s APIs (Application Programming Interface) to give your security system access to everyone’s email. This is an approach both Workspace and Office365 users employ to improve their cybersecurity. With the API approach the security software watches email as it hits people’s inboxes and continues to watch what happens next.  This can be valuable because some forms of cyber attack are difficult to detect when the email is on the way in.  Cyber criminals have developed some strategies which don’t “activate” until an email actually gets to an inbox–secifically designed to get through gateway systems. 

The API-based solutions can also take action once the email has arrived, too, which can be helpful if what appeared at first to be a legitimate email is discovered to be an attack.  Let’s say 15 people received this email which appeared normal, but when one person clicked the attachment, it was found to be an attack.  With an API-based solution, because the solution is monitoring all users’ mail, when that one person’s email message is found to be dangerous, that email can be rescinded from all 15 mailboxes.

Securing your email is just one component, but it’s an important one. Contact Us if you’d like to learn more about these and other tactics to improve your cybersecurity defenses. Many of our cybersecurity solutions are outlined on our Cybersecurity page. Consider reviewing our one-pager 15 Ways To Protect Your Business From A Cyber Attack to see which areas you feel are comfortably addressed in your organization, and which areas leave you with questions.