Did you hear it? York County officials are urging residents to check their online accounts after a county email was breached about a year ago. They fear that some sensitive information within it may have been compromised.
Then, this June, some journalists at The Washington Post also had their email accounts targeted in a cyberattack.
Stories like these make the headlines almost daily. Emails, while convenient, aren’t automatically safe.
Hackers are constantly eyeing inboxes, especially those of businesses, to steal customer data. God forbid, if a hacker gains access to your email accounts, they can leak customer data. This can seriously tarnish your reputation.
You’re not powerless, however. There are steps you can take to lock down your company’s email system. What are those? We’ll discuss that here.
#1 Create a Digital Security Guard with Data Loss Prevention
DLP, or data loss prevention, is a security measure that protects sensitive information.
It’s a security guard for your digital information, especially your outgoing emails. It monitors, detects, and prevents unauthorized data from leaving your organization. That is to say, it scans outgoing emails for credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, or confidential files.
If the system spots something risky, it can block the email, alert the sender, or require manager approval before sending. This way, mistakes get caught before they become full-blown security breaches.
The technology behind DLP doesn’t rely on simple text scans. Instead, it uses deep content analysis for identifying sensitive data.
A DLP solution, for instance, can use regular expressions to find patterns that match a 16-digit credit card number or a 9-digit Social Security number. More advanced systems use machine learning and behavioral analytics to add context, helping to reduce false positives.
It’s because of these benefits that the market for DLP is exploding. Worth $1.84 billion in 2022, it’s expected to reach a massive $10.05 billion by 2030. That’s a huge jump.
#2 Secure the Mail Route with Transport Layer Security
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol that secures network communications, including email, over unprotected connections like the internet.
TLS provides what is known as in-transit or hop-by-hop encryption. This means that the email is encrypted while traveling between your device and the mail server. It is then decrypted, briefly exposed, and re-encrypted at each server it passes through on its way to the final destination.
Without it, the email is sent in plaintext. That means anyone can intercept it in transit. Leaked communications pose a particular danger to law firms handling sensitive cases, where such leaks could sway public opinion or compromise legal strategy.
Take the TikTok lawsuit on mental health, for instance. This lawsuit claims that TikTok’s algorithm and design are intentionally designed to harm the mental health of users under 21.
According to TruLaw, legal consultation for the case requires documentation of the child’s TikTok usage and injuries, proof of damages, and evidence of ongoing treatment or care needs.
Not implementing TLS means these highly sensitive documents, if sent over unsecured email, could be exposed to unauthorized parties. That puts clients at risk, undermining your firm’s ethical duty to protect attorney-client privilege. Thus, TLS is not just a technical safeguard, but a legal necessity.
#3 Prove Your Emails Are the Real Deal with Digital Signatures
Encryption makes your emails unreadable to outsiders, but how does a customer know that an email really came from you? It’s digital signatures that prove that emails actually came from you.
Digital signatures stamp the emails with a unique, unforgeable virtual fingerprint. It verifies that the email is truly from your business and hasn’t been altered. This makes them an essential defense against phishing, brand impersonation, and other attacks that rely on a sender’s identity being faked.
In America, the law considers a digital signature just as good as a regular one. Thanks to laws like the ESIGN Act and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA), you can legally sign contracts and other important business papers using a digital signature.
Setting up digital signatures usually involves getting a digital certificate from a trusted provider. Your email client then uses this certificate to automatically sign outgoing messages. Recipients can verify the signature to confirm the email’s authenticity.
Many email systems already support them through standards like DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions).
Building a Digital Armor for Your Business
Email is an important business tool. But it has serious security risks.
Unencrypted messages, phishing scams, and data breaches can all threaten a company’s finances and reputation. These strategies, though, can help you turn your email system from a potential risk into a safe, reliable communication channel.
Secure email practices do more than just protect your business from those expensive data breaches that make headlines. They also send a clear message to your customers that you genuinely care about their privacy. And so, they feel more confident doing business with you.
So, don’t wait; put these tips into action now to turn your email into a secure, dependable asset for your business.
