Welcome back to our blog series on making your IT infrastructure more secure. If you’ve been following along for the past several weeks, you’ve already read our entries on the first four steps in the process: Performing a security audit, creating and enforcing IT security policies, updating your anti-virus solution, and updating workstations and servers. The next step is protecting your email with a hosted spam solution.
If you’re one of the many office workers who spends your days fielding dozens of incoming emails, you’re already familiar with the concept of spam. Email is an increasingly common mode of communication: The average business user is expected to send and receive upwards of 126 messages each day by 2019, according to a report from The Radicati Group.
Cyber criminals take advantage of the popularity of email, crafting messages that imitate legitimate correspondence to trick recipients into granting access to sensitive data (a tactic known as “phishing”).
You might think that spotting spam and evading hackers’ tricks is easy for most people, but it’s often difficult to correctly identify 100% of the phishing attacks that can end up in your inbox. A quiz Intel Security developed that tested consumers’ ability to discern whether each of a set of 10 emails was genuine or malicious found that only 3% of the quiz takers got a perfect score. The majority (80%) guessed wrong about at least one of the emails.
If even one employee falls for an email scam and clicks on a malicious link or downloads an attachment containing malware, the fallout could be significant and costly for your company. A Cloudmark survey of enterprises that were victims of targeted “spear phishing” attacks found that 43% suffered a drop in productivity, 29% experienced reputation damage, and 15% saw their stock prices decline as a result.
Fortunately, businesses don’t have to depend on users’ judgment alone to protect against malicious spam messages. A hosted spam solution can block spam and cyberattacks before they reach your company’s network. Having this form of email protection in place is essential if you want to achieve the maximum level of security for your IT infrastructure and minimize your risk of data breaches as much as possible.
Here are some of the characteristics of a hosted spam filter solution:
- Can be layered on top of your company’s hosted email services
- Can feature customized settings to meet your organization’s unique needs
- Allows you to blacklist and whitelist certain domains, in addition to blocking spam and cyber threats
Once you’ve secured your email with a hosted spam filter solution, you’re one step closer to achieving optimal security for your overall IT infrastructure. Come back next week to learn what comes next in the process.
In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about hosted spam solutions, feel free to contact our expert team at 877-599-3999 or sales@stratospherenetworks.com. We offer hosted spam solutions (in addition to other email migration and anti-spam offerings) and can answer any questions you have about protecting your business from malicious email-related attacks like spear phishing.
