On 3rd July 2021, BigDomain had its Live event talking about Remote Working Transformation: How to Avoid Email Spam. It is about how working from home has changed the corporate culture and the importance of email security when every working adult depends on email daily.
Here are some of the recaps from the event. For the full version, you can visit here to get the visual and aural experiences.
Introduction
With working from home in place across the nation, spam mail and phishing emails appear daily in your mailbox, as Payment Confirmation, unexpected fake prizes and lottery scam. These are the common scam that people are facing nowadays.
Imagine you have 100 emails coming in per day (big businesses might have astronomical figures, but we tone it down here). There might be 60% promotional advertising mail, and 10-30% are from scammers and spammers.
Employers and employees have hundreds or even thousands of emails every day to check. When the time is limited and precious, people will not pay too much attention to the legibility of email. They would be eager to open the email to check whether their colleagues or clients respond to their queries.
When you receive the least protection, scammers will use email communications to obtain your personal information.
Therefore, email security is actually very important for you while you are working from home.
Email Security knowledge: How To Spot A Phishing Email
When many people think that small businesses and companies are prone to email phishing and scams due to the lack of security, you have no idea how famous brands are once the victims too.
In 2017, BBC reported that Google and Facebook had lost 100 million because of being hacked. You can understand how a small hacker can cost tremendous financial loss for businesses. No matter how prepared you claim to be, when there is a will, there is a way to hack into the security, no matter how sophisticated and complicated your technology has.
They may attempt to steal passwords, account numbers, or your personal data. They might get access to your email, bank account, or other accounts if they obtain such information. Every day, scammers conduct hundreds of phishing assaults like this, and they are usually successful.
Phishing emails may appear to be from a firm you are familiar with or trust. They may appear to be from a bank, credit card business, social networking site, online payment website or app, or online retailer.
Phishing emails usually fabricate a story to mislead you to click on links or open files. They might claim that
- your payment cannot go through and ask for another price again
- there is a giveaway that requires your personal information to proceed
- your account has been disabled, and you need to change your current username and password
These are some of the signs of rubbish email and phishing email. Here is a real-life phishing email example.
Above is an email sample we got from a Japanese client. Do you spot any sign that might indicate it as a scam? Let’s have a closer look.
This email is trying to imitate a trusted company you may know: Amazon.
While this email appears to be genuine at first sight, it is not. Scammers that send emails like this have no affiliation with the companies they claim to represent. They can also damage the reputation of the company they are impersonating.
Terms you need to know about email security
According to Pandasecurity.com, there are few terms you may need to know for email security.
- Email phishing – financial and business-related scam
- Spear phishing and whaling – usually target management team, CEO executive, what we consider as high-level phishing.
- Smishing – SMS scam
- Vishing – Phone scam
- Business email compromise – CEO fraud leads to account hacking.
- Clone phishing – one legit email sent, then a fake one s ent almost the same email about the same event, so you would not get suspicious and click inside it.
- Evil twin phishing – Wifi hack
- Social media, search engines, pharming
Most of the successful scammers attack the weakest chain! Imagine the whole office is operated with top-notch CCTV security with double-layered high-tech. But, there’s an issue. The office has no door – no gated security, which is the most fundamental one. Hence, the importance of a basic firewall and safety has to be focused on and emphasized.
How a Hosting Company provides email security
BigDomain has some great recommendations for businesses that can help to back up your hosting security.
- cPanel anti spam (spamAssassin)
- Score base system
Below 5 is fine. Score more than 5 will go to spam.
- RBL (Real-time Blackhole Listing)
Compare IP address for every email
- SPF/DMARC
The recipient would not get any email from an unofficial IP address. Impersonator email will get into the spam mail.
- Premium AntiSpam Corporate Level
- Daily process (2.5 million active domains)
- Near 100% accuracy
- Predictive, self-learning
- Real-time intelligent share with millions of customer
- Not only protect incoming email but send your email via hundreds of Spam Protected IP
- Protect IP before without getting blocklist
- As cheap as RM40/month (We even give trials for non-bigdomain subscribers. Whatsapp us for more info)
Bonus Tips:
- Spot the email address to check for misspellings of the company name. If the name is not the name of the official company, report it as a phishing email.
- Do not click any link in the email address. Instead, copy and paste the link into your browser, and you can go to the official website and perform the activity directly there.
Conclusion
With basic email security, your employees’ productivity increases, and more time to be saved. If not, there would be an unexpected enormous financial loss that your business has to bear. If there is no primary security filter like our recommended software, there would be hundreds and thousands of emails coming into your inbox that confuses you and congest your inbox.
For further assistance, contact us now go.bigdomain.my/marketing
