Email Safety Tips
According to the UK Government’s most recent Cyber Security Breach Survey, UK businesses and charities have experienced approximately 7.78 million cyber crimes in the last 12 months. One of the most common types of security breaches to businesses is Phishing.
Phishing can often take the form of impersonating organisations in emails or online. The emails often direct individuals to fraudulent websites or use harmful URL links, which contain viruses or other malware within the body of an email.
Cyber security education is essential for organisations as cyber breaches can have serious consequences such as financial loss, leaked business knowledge, and diminished client trust.
Keep your data safe from cyber scammers with our guide to Email Safety Tips.
What is Email Safety?
Email safety is a vital practice for all businesses and individuals. With the average person receiving up to 100 emails per day, email threats such as spam, phishing, and spoofing are incredibly common.
Having a solid email security plan is the best solution to combat malware viruses, data breaches or system downtimes. You can protect your data and sensitive information with software that blocks unauthorised access and prevents compromise.
Establishments can also protect their email accounts by implementing awareness training courses. You can find out more about our training courses on our Cyber Essentials page.
Common Types of Email Threats for Organisations
Phishing
Cyber criminals will often use ‘phishing’ as a method to hunt for online victims. The attacker aims to steal sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, bank information, card numbers, and other important data.
The attacker will do this by masquerading as a ‘genuine’ source contacting you with:
- Attractive offers that encourage you to click on URLs. These URLs can unleash viruses and malware on your computer.
- Urgent and persuasive language to convince you to take action and limit your questioning time.
- Enticing images that persuade you to click on them. Images in emails also hold URL links that can unleash malware and hack your data.
Malware
Malware is malicious software that can be infiltrated in your business’ computers to disrupt the user, client, server or computer network. Malware can also leak sensitive information and give unauthorised access to information systems.
Malware covers a wide range of terms from spyware to viruses, worms, ransomware trojan horses, and more.
With up to 70% of medium-sized businesses experiencing some form of cyber-attack, protecting your company’s devices and data against intrusive software is an important practice within your business. We offer Anti-Malware Software and Anti-Virus Software to eliminate cyber threats and optimise security.
Find out more here.
Data Exfiltration
Otherwise known as data theft, data exfiltration is used to transfer stolen data from a computer to another device. Attackers may have many different motives for doing this such as selling data to a company competitor, attaining personal financial information, or hacking into trade or corporate secrets.
Data exfiltration can have an extremely negative impact on your business as it may lead to:
- Loss of clients’ trust
- Loss of intellectual property
- Leaked sensitive information
- Information misuse and abuse
- Expensive incident process
- Lawsuits
If you need more advice, please contact us to discuss our cyber security services.
Spoofing
Email spoofing is the act of impersonating another person or company to gain information by engaging in conversation with you. Online criminals may ascertain your business credentials through social media apps such as LinkedIn or Facebook to appear more legitimate when they contact you personally.
The name of the individual might seem normal or generic at first but make sure to look out for the sender’s email address. Email addresses are usually an obvious indicator that the person contacting you, is not legitimate.
If you receive any emails from someone unknown to you or your business make sure to raise this with your IT team immediately.
Spam
Email spam can range from one to multiple unwanted emails that are sent in bulk to lots of recipients without their consent.
Phishing is a common method used in spam emails to steal your sensitive information. Never click any links, attachments, images, or ‘opt out/opt in’ links in a spam email
Many email accounts offer you the option to ‘Report as spam’ (outside of the email’s content) but most businesses use anti-spam software that will automatically redirect spam into a spam folder or bin.
Get in contact with us to find out more about our anti-spam software, Sentinel Mail Protect, and more of our Cyber Security Services.
Common types of spam include:
- Commercial advertisements
- Antivirus warnings
- Email spoofing - mimicking company brands/organisations
- Sweepstake winners
- Money scams
Email Safety Tips & Best Practices
Update or Install Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware Software
Protect all of your devices with fully managed firewalls, ongoing live security, and firmware updates with our protection software.
Pick from SentinelOne®, Sentinel Online-Backup, Sentinel Risk Intelligence, Sentinel System-Monitor, Sentinel Mail-Catcher, Sentinel Mail-Archive.
Enrol in our Cyber Essentials Course
Businesses are required to take Cyber Essentials courses to educate their employees and raise awareness of cyber-attacks. This course can play an active role in preventing invasive attacks from happening to your company.
We run a government-backed Cyber Essentials course to help businesses better protect their sensitive information through training in the following areas:
- Cyber Security
- Cyber Essentials - including workshops with our accredited team.
- Vulnerability and penetration testing
- Best practise report
Once your training is complete, you will be assessed on your knowledge and if you are successful, you will receive an official certification.
Back Up Your Data with Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery
Cloud Backup
If your systems face downtime due to natural disaster, human error or system corruption, you’ll want to make sure that important files are stored safely and easy to retrieve. At Minster Micro, we offer the Datasure Backup range which protects Microsoft 365 solutions including:
- Outlook
- Teams
- OneDrive
- SharePoint
Disaster Recovery
We offer Disaster Recovery services to a range of businesses when unplanned disasters occur. We highly recommend these services as they offer peace of mind and reduce costs of downtime for your business if a disaster does occur.
If you are interested in organising a Disaster Recovery Plan, please get in touch with our team. We work closely with our customers to develop the right plan for them.
FAQs for Email Safety Tips
- Scan all email attachments for malware.
- Do not open or download any email attachments or documents from unknown sources.
- Never click links or attachments in the main body of the email from unknown senders.
- Regularly update passwords, web browsers, and operating systems.
- Communicate potential fraudulent emails with your team members and IT department.
- Implement anti-virus and anti-malware software.
- Create a data recovery and protection plan and back up your data.
Get in touch with Minster Micro for information about your IT hardware and cyber security concerns.
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