How To Manage Email Vulnerabilities In 2019 And Beyond

Dr. Brené Brown once said that vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.

She hit the bull’s eye with that knowledge bomb, and that model of thinking can be easily applied to any part of our everyday life, too!

Vulnerability is the target we need to face before stepping up and raising the proverbial bar anywhere. Without weaknesses there would be no motivation to move forward, and thus the stagnation would devour and melt us in its ugly belly.

Go-getters know exactly what this is all about, as they never stop working and learning to perfect themselves. There’s no limit to perfection.

Everything that surrounds us has a defect, and it’s our mission to make things and people that surround us better, to grow as human beings ourselves as a result. Why don’t we evaluate one thing that we use on a daily basis right now?

Email Vulnerability Assessment in the Age of Email Security Threats

Yes, we are going to look at email under a microscope to find out what exactly will make it unsafe and vulnerable to cyber threats in 2019.

Email security vulnerabilities have been around for years, but they are still getting exploited because people are refusing to educate themselves.

Their resistance to getting smarter results in a lot of stories with a sad ending.

Data breaches are very popular for sure, but the most basic mistake that keeps popping up is sending a confidential email to the wrong address. You can easily misclick once and get booted from the job as quickly as you pressed on that button.

Let’s Analyze The Problem At Hand To Avoid That

To the naked eye, email looks perfectly fine and causes no problems that we don’t cause ourselves. Instead it makes our everyday life easier, enabling us to share information with people from different branches of our life.

Via email we can keep in touch with our distant business clients, find out how our family members are doing, acquire and sell valuable items and do many other things easily and for free.

But despite however useful email might be, we can’t just look at them through rose-colored glasses and keep on relying on them 100%.

You know how tough it is to be the best version of yourself when you don’t trust your aid wholeheartedly. When you are not dedicated to something fully, you always end up getting hurt.

So what makes emails vulnerable, and why can’t they guarantee that the information stored in them is safe and sound? What are those email threats everyone is losing their minds about?

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Is the Core Email Security Vulnerability

When we talk about the main email vulnerabilities and threats, we can’t start from anything else but SMTP. This protocol is undoubtedly the root of most problems related to emails.

Presented to the world in 1982, SMTP became an Internet standard for email transmission. It gave our society impressive flexibility in online communication, and that positive came with a full wagon of cons attached to it. Think about it, the word “flexible” isn’t anywhere close to the word “secure.”

You don’t build rubber walls to protect your kingdom, that’s just not the way to do it. Let’s underline the types of email threats SMTP brings to the table:

1. Anyone who takes over an email relay can interject himself in your conversation and get involved in the data exchange between you and the recipient. This is called a “man-in-the-middle” attack.

Hackers get the words that come from your side and change them to something that will benefit them, exploiting email security vulnerabilities without any resistance.

1. Senders can claim to be anyone, and you can’t know for sure if you are talking with the right person. This little notion gives online criminals everything to launch a successful phishing attack.

Phishing attacks rely on identity theft and spoofing to fool the recipient into sharing the sensitive information. They are mainly used in whale and clone phishing to extract monetary goods from executives who have a hold of company’s finances.

Just so you understand how serious they can be, the average cost of a of a phishing attack stands at a whopping $1.6 million!

1. Using regular emails that heavily rely on SMTP will get you in trouble with the law. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) prohibits you from sending confidential and highly sensitive data in plain text.

Trading Cufflinks for a Pair of Handcuffs

Non-compliance with the new European privacy and data protection rules can cost you up to 20 million euros in fines! Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) also may result in a hefty fine, as patient information cannot be available to the Public Internet.

We have defined the most common email vulnerabilities, all existing due to SMTP’s out-of-date condition. Even though the protocol was slightly updated in 2008, it is still lacking to protect you from sophisticated cyber attacks and keep your working position stable and solid.

Any of the aforementioned attacks can lead to your dismissal from the job. The CEOs often take the fall first, especially when we talk about legal compliance. Violation of the rules can not only oblige your company to pay astronomical fines, but can also lead to your imprisonment.

After this vulnerability assessment it only makes sense to look for ways to deal with the problems at hand.

Efficient Vulnerability Management Is Not a Pipe Dream

After blasting SMTP, we can surely say that the second issue that can give your corporate sector a huge headache is undoubtedly the people who work for you. Nobody is safe from mistakes, even with a respectable level of cyber education.

A solution that can minimize the harm of human error and eradicate the threats of the public Internet is called StealthMail, a leader among email security technologies.

It is a military-grade solution that protects your emails by encrypting them from unauthorized access. Encryption is a temporary deformation of the content, that is made to limit the access of outsiders to the email with confidential information.

Encryption as a Way to “Censor” Your Data

Think of encryption as a blurry square that appears when people don’t want their face shown on TV. The beeping sound is used to cover up the original meaning of the message too, so people would have a tougher time understanding what is being said.

The same thing is done to the content of your emails, so “man-in-the-middle” attacks are off the table.

Only the intended recipient of the letter can decode an encrypted email.

To keep unregulated entries from happening, StealthMail runs a digital signature policy that only allows verified personalities to gain the information, and a two-way authentication when welcoming a user into the system.

The keys that decrypt the emails are stored in your secure perimeter, as only you should have access to them. Vulnerability management should include human beings as well as machines.

To truly keep the third party out of the loop you need to keep all the information to yourself. That also concerns the content of the confidential email, which is getting extracted from the email and to the cloud of your own company and substituted with an info-free Stealth Link to give the recipient a location to access the content.

The link has no power without the context, so it is the most secure way to process the corporate correspondence.

Swift Response of the StealthMail Solution

The StealthMail solution will make your emails legally compliant and protected with encryption armor. You won’t ever feel that “armor” on yourself, because StealthMail is easily deployed and harmless to the existing IT infrastructure of your company.

Remember that performing an email vulnerability assessment is a business-critical task that needs to be completed without any delays, because there’s too much at stake.

StealthMail makes vulnerability management effortless, combining all types of email security in one easy-to-use software. Visit StealthMail.com today to schedule a free consultation about the solution and destroy the existing email vulnerabilities and threats.