Email is the way to communicate your brand’s products and services. It can be a way to interact with your customers, prospects, or employees. Most email carries sensitive information like bank account details, credit card numbers, trade talks, and many more. Most often the focus was on ensuring that the infrastructure was capable of supporting the new remote workers and not on security.

Email-based attacks work well for attackers, so they are unlikely to be abandoned any time soon. Only by deploying comprehensive, targeted email protections will organizations protect themselves from the email threat.

Why You Need Email Threat Protection

When it comes to email threats, classic measures like the latest antivirus software will never block cyber-attacks especially advanced social engineering attacks.  Sadly, Emails are the first target of cyberattacks, which hackers use to steal your company’s private confidential data.

A report by Verizon says that almost 1/3rd of all data breaches in 2019 involved phishing.

Automated Email Threat Attacks

These days attackers have started automating email threat attacks, it’s easy for them to target thousands of small businesses at once. Small businesses often have less stringent technological defences, less awareness of email threats and less time and resources to put into cybersecurity. This makes them an easier target for hackers than bigger organizations.

For the same reason, small businesses need to be aware of email threats. This article will cover the top 5 security email threats faced by small businesses, and how they can be prevented.

1. Virus Email Threats

A single email virus can cost your company an enormous amount of damages. It is important to have protection against all threats to data security such as email viruses, spam, phishing, ransomware, email flooding, directory harvest attacks, and denial of service attacks.

2. Phishing Attack

Phishing is a type of trick used to extract personal financial information from victims. Phisher’s target can be any email account holder. The attackers obtain email addresses and then send messages to individual recipients who claim to be from a financial institution, Internet service provider, or other authority requesting account passwords or unique identification or data that can give them access to the victim’s bank accounts, credit cards, or other personal records. That can occur because giving phisher access to your account also exposes the victim’s email address book, enabling the phisher to then send spam emails to all of those people.

3. Ransomware Email Threats

Ransomware is a type of malware that threatens to display or block access to data, generally by encrypting it, till the victim pays a ransom fee to attackers. There are two types of ransomware attacks, commonly known as encryptors and screen lockers. Encryptors encrypt the data, making the content useless without the decryption key. The screen lockers may block access to the system with a lock screen stating that the system is encrypted.

Enterprise ransomware viruses generally start with a malicious email. An unsuspecting user opens the attachment or clicks on the URL which is malicious or has been compromised. Email Phishing and spam are the major cause of ransomware attacks.

3. DoS Email Threats

Attackers may be able to accomplish their goals without exactly obtaining access to the contents of email communication that send and receive messages. This kind of attack is called a denial of service attack, which may involve an attack on the company’s email infrastructure, causing it to crash. Brute force DoS attacks may flow through a company’s email server with fraudulent messages that use up all available resources, resulting in network congestion that prevents the authentic messages from getting through.

 4. Weak Passwords Causing Email Threats

Many small businesses use multiple cloud-based services, that require different accounts. These services often can contain sensitive data and financial information. If you use easily guessable passwords or use the same passwords for multiple accounts, can cause this data to be compromised. Small businesses are often at risk from compromises that come from employees using weak passwords and not knowing about the damage they can cause.

Email threats faced by small businesses

Today email threats are more sophisticated and more prevalent than they have ever been before. There is a range of threats facing small businesses at the moment. The best way for small businesses to protect against these threats is to have a comprehensive set of security tools in place.

Systix’s cloudx offers a safe and secure solution to stay safe without compromising your business data. Secure your business for the future by partnering with an industry leader to safeguard your users, data, and brand.