E-mail Security - A Pocket Guide

Description

Make your organization's email secure

Your business relies on email for its everyday dealings with partners, suppliers, and customers. While email is an invaluable form of communication, it also represents a potential threat to your information security. Email could become the means for criminals to install a virus or malicious software on your computer system and fraudsters will try to use emails to obtain sensitive information through phishing scams.

This pocket guide will cover the following:

• Safeguard email security

  If you want to safeguard your company’s ability to function, it is essential to have an effective email security policy in place and to ensure your staff understand the risks associated with email.

• Email security best practice

  This pocket guide will help businesses to address the most important issues. Its comprehensive approach covers both the technical and the managerial aspects of the subject, offering valuable insights for IT professionals, managers and executives, as well as for individual users of email.

• Overcome email security threats

  The pocket guide covers the various types of threat to which e-mail may expose your organisation, and offers advice on how to counter social engineering by raising staff awareness.

• Choose the most secure email client

  The client is the computer program that manages the user's email. Malicious emails often operate through attachment files that infect computer systems with malware when downloaded. This pocket guide explains how you can enhance your information security by configuring the email client to block attachments or to limit their size.

• Protect your company's information

  What kind of information should you include in an email? How do you know that the email will not be intercepted by a third party after you have sent it? This guide looks at countermeasures you can take to ensure that your emails only reach the intended recipient and how to preserve confidentiality through the use of encryption.

• Protect your company's reputation

  Crude jokes, obscene language, or sexist remarks will have an adverse effect on your organization's reputation when they are found in emails sent out by your employees from their work account. This pocket guide offers advice on how to create an acceptable use policy to ensure that employee use of email in the workplace does not end up embarrassing your organization.

The pocket guide provides a concise reference to the main security issues affecting those that deploy and use email to support their organizations, considering email in terms of its significance in a business context and focusing upon why effective security policy and safeguards are crucial in ensuring the viability of business operations.

About the authors:

Professor Steven Furnell is Professor of Information Systems Security and Head of School at the University of Plymouth’s Centre for Security, Communications and Network Research. 

Dr. Paul Dowland is Senior Lecturer in Information Systems Security at the University of Plymouth’s Centre for Security, Communications and Network Research. He is the author or editor of over 70 research publications.