For organizations, email remains one of the most targeted and vulnerable entry points for cyber attackers. Strengthening email security isn’t just about protecting inboxes — it’s about safeguarding sensitive citizen data, ensuring continuity of essential services, and reducing the financial and reputational fallout that can follow a breach. In a landscape of increasing threats and public accountability, robust email protection is a critical part of your cyber resilience strategy.
Why email security matters: Much like a security guard ensuring authorized individuals have access to a building, email security allows organizations to control and validate what email material enters their digital space. Similar to managing building keys and validating IDs, effective email security ensures that only legitimate users and devices have access to sensitive communications, preventing unauthorized entry and protecting against potential data breaches or malicious activities.
Email domain filtering and flagging: Because email is a natural entry point to any organization's network, you must verify the legitimacy of emails before granting access to your network and end users. Akin to a bouncer scrutinizing IDs, email domain filtering allows organizations to filter and verify the legitimacy of incoming emails based on their domain, ensuring that only emails from trusted sources are permitted entry. Where you cannot outright filter emails, flagging emails for end users based on domain is a necessary precaution to ensure unauthorized communication does not affect network and operations.
Email attachment and link security: Robust email attachment and link security protocols ensure that any files or links arriving in emails are thoroughly examined for malicious content, reducing the risk of malware, phishing or other cyber threats entering the organization's digital space. Meticulous examination protects against potential data breaches and reinforces the overall integrity of email communications. Additionally, these measures provide the end user with sufficient notice to make informed decisions about what they access within email services.
SPF & DMARC: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) records are about setting up stringent access controls and identity checks for emails requesting access to your network. The use of these frameworks ensures that emails can only be successfully sent from domains authorized by the SPF and DMARC records. These records play a pivotal role in defending against email spoofing, phishing attacks, and receiving emails from unauthorized sources; overall contributing to more secure and trustworthy email communication.
Phishing training and exercises: Providing email phishing training and exercises ensure employees are well-prepared to identify and respond effectively to suspicious or malicious emails. Just as fire drills enhance awareness and readiness for unseen events, phishing training provides users with the knowledge to recognize and thwart phishing attempts. The combination of phishing education material and phishing exercises affords an organization with a vigilant user base that actively contributes to the organization’s overall cyber security resilience.
Email on personal devices: If you allow members of your organization to access emails on their personal devices, then you must insist on a layer of MFA (multi factor authentication). Firstly, this is because personal devices are “authorized guests” on your organization network, and need to meet security standards before being allowed major network access. Secondly, personal devices like cell phones are often lost or stolen. If this happens to a device with an organization email on it a threat actor can gain access to a legitimate user profile and launch attacks from inside your network.
Email security and assessment: A rigorous cyber security assessment for compliance certification, insurance application, or similar will cover your email security because it is one of the most common ways organizations of all sizes and types get attacked. You should be able to demonstrate that all users are regularly trained in identifying common email attacks such as phishing and that there are processes in place for users to report this swiftly. They also will assess whether organizations have robust filtering, flagging, and appropriate SPF and DMARC in place.
Checklist
When reviewing email security, consider the following: