E-mail Security

Protect Your Organization! Protect Yourself!

E-mail! Ever imagined life without e-mail? You’d actually have to use your hand to write a letter on paper, stick a stamp on it, and drop it into a postbox (gasp!). All right, so recognizing how critical e-mail is to business and personal life, hackers consider it a prime target. It is important to know how to stay safe.

Passwords

Ok, ok….stop snoring already! This isn’t another sermon about a 23 character password with stars and doodles in it. Listen; think of the simplest password possible first, e.g. – mydogsparky or baseballisfun. Ok, now replace e’s with 3, s’s with $, and a’s with @. And then start the password with a capital letter. So our passwords now are – Mydog$p@rky and B@$3b@lli$fun. How ‘bout that! Hack that y’all!

2.      E-mail Is A Glass House

If you had to live in a glass house, would you change your clothes without at least a makeshift “changing room”? If your answer is yes, then you need more help than just security awareness! Think like that about e-mail – it’s an unencrypted channel that’s carrying your information in the nude. Anytime you want to send anything remotely confidential for you or your organization (e.g. customer information, card numbers, SSN, usernames/passwords), send it as an encrypted attachment and then send the password over the phone or in a separate e-mail.

Phishing

Roughly 10% of your e-mails are going to be from “unknown” people. Think of these the same way you think of your daughter’s boyfriend! If it has an urgent call to action (e.g. your account will be terminated, you will be fined), consider it a joke, laugh it off, and delete it. What professional organization would send an e-mail like that?! Take a look at the sender’s e-mail address to see if there’s something fishy. If it appears legit, hover over the link and the tool tip will tell you where it’s really taking you. Lastly, don’t EVER enter any personal and/ or confidential information.

Why Bother?

A great question! What’s in it for you, really?! Think of it this way-

•  When a hacker gets into your organization’s network, what’s the easiest target? It’s the HR data which holds employee (your) sensitive information.  Remember everything you provided to HR when you joined? Can you say Identity Theft?!
•  If a hacker attack involves your work computer (not that hard to do), you’ll have to prove that it wasn’t you!
•  How safe are your children and family online? If you’re security smart, you’ll teach them; and that will protect your kids in the unsafe cyber-world.

This is actually more about protecting yourself, your career, and your family.