Research indicates that over 280 billion emails are sent daily, making email a very important communication tool. Businesses use emails to generate new leads and solve the needs of customers wherever in the world they may be.

Despite being very critical to your business, emails are like postcards flying through the internet and can be easily attacked from outside. Data theft, impersonation, and extortion are some of the ways an insecure email account can affect your business unless you take the necessary security measures.

If It Looks Fishy, It Is Phishing

Hackers send genuine-looking emails posing to be originating from known service providers with external links to their fake sites, often with messages that demand urgent action. Clicking on the links provided takes you to fake websites where any sensitive information you enter goes directly to the scammers.

To stay safe, double-check any email that requires you to click on any link. If the email requires sensitive data but doesn’t address you by name, chances are it’s phoney; your bank will know your name. Also look out for other signs of phishing. Some hackers may be able to guess your name from your email address. For example, if your email address is belinda.adams@mycompany.com, it’s easy to guess that your name is Belinda Adams. In addition to checking if you were addressed by name, also check the address the email came from. If it didn’t come from your provider’s domain, it’s most likely dubious.

Scammers are increasingly getting crafty with mimicking legitimate URLs of service providers they launch phishing attacks on. For example, they may direct you to a fake gesatecch.com, seeking to mimic the real site gesatech.com. Be vigilant. Pay attention to your service providers’ protocols. Don’t ignore even the slightest of variations in URLs and email addresses. When in doubt, call your service provider to confirm they sent you an email before doing anything.

Be careful about emails that ask you to verify your account by a certain date or risk it getting terminated. Credible email service providers never do that. If your password needs to be reset for security reasons, most providers will initiate a password change back-end, which will prompt you to change your password after you have logged in to their control panel’s front-end or dashboard the normal way.

Passwords

When creating passwords, avoid predictable combinations like your birth date. It’s advisable to use a combination of numbers, letters, and mix up lower and upper cases. Special characters like “~” and “)(” help make your passwords difficult to predict. Another technique to make it secure is to use single letters and numbers to represent whole words. Example: MyFavouriteTEAMisAccraHeartsofOAK could become m5T!@ccr@H0K.

More importantly, keep your passwords secret.

Use 2-Step Verification

If your email provider supports it, use a 2-step authentication service to access your account. To use a 2-step authentication to sign into your email account, “you’ll need something you know (your password) and something you have (a code sent to your phone).” After entering your password, your provider will then send a code to your mobile phone to confirm that you are indeed the person attempting to do the sign-in. Remember that this will only work if you enable the 2-step verification process in your email security settings.

Email Recoveries

If you happen to forget your password, most email service providers will send your login credentials to another email account. This option is only possible if you’ve added a recovery email address to your account. By clicking on forgotten password, you’ll receive instructions on what to do in your recovery account.

Encryption

Emails can be read by your internet service provider, the server administrators, or government agencies. To secure the contents of your email account, you can invest in encryption services to make your messages unreadable. A handful of email providers automatically offer encryption services for all their users. Even so, you should check out other third-party encryption providers for more protection.

Protect Your Computer

It’s important to have a secured computer to stop perpetrators of cyber threats. To do this, you’ll need to install and configure a reliable antivirus programme. There are many free versions online. However, the more robust products come at reasonable prices. A well-equipped antivirus will alert you if you click on a dubious link in an email. McAfee and Kaspersky are highly recommended products.