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2023 Ultimate Email Protection Guide to keeping your emails safe

Sending regular emails between friends or colleagues may seem harmless to you but they are a goldmine to any hackers or scammers. It’s common practice nowadays to send sensitive information over email and hackers will do anything they can to try and steal that.

Making sure that your emails are secure is something that isn’t second nature quite yet as many people do not understand the risks associated. Of course, sending a friend a few emails may seem completely harmless and you may thing that it doesn’t need any extra security.

It’s normal to think that emails without any sensitive data inside are safe but any emails containing things like the name of the school you went to or your pets name might expose you more than you think. Attackers are very elaborate these days and will try to gather as much data about you over a period of time to build a profile of who you are. This lets the attackers find the area where you are most vulnerable and hit there.

Does my email need any extra security?

In short, yes it does. Most email providers provide you with very basic security such as spam filters however they do not perform a decent job at filtering out all of the malicious emails that you are sent. The only issue is that scams are becoming more elaborate every single day and it is now at the point where a carefully thought-out scam will make its way through the in-built security measures of your email provider.

It is very important to understand the different threats that can be thrown at your email inbox. No amount of technology will protect you if you do not know what you are looking for. It is very important that you do regular research to know how different scams develop so that you know how to spot them.

Types of threats

There are a variety of different threats that a user may experience. They can mostly be organised into two categories:

Inbox threats

Inbox threats usually come in the form of phishing emails. Phishing emails are a very common method of scamming people these days. They usually contain links to hacker-controlled domains or links to install malicious software.

Phishing emails are usually crafted to make the victim give up their precious information to the hacker using different types of bait. Phishing emails come in a variety of methods like mass phishing, spear phishing etc. In short, they are all trying to do the same thing. They send fake messages posing as a trusted sender, they then try to gain the trust of the attackers and then if they are successful, the victim will cough up their data.

Transit threats

There is also another method that they use to try and steal your data. They will try to intercept your sent emails whilst they are in transit. This is also known as MitM (man in the middle) attacks. They monitor a series of emails between two parties and craft a phishing email off the back of that.

Best ways to protect your emails

So now that you know about the potential threats surround your email inbox, you probably would want to know what steps you can take to protect them.

Below are the measures you can take to make sure that you are as safe as possible when sending emails:

  • Use a VPN
  • Create custom filters for your emails based on the scam emails you receive
  • Download antivirus software
  • Use extra email security such as email encryption
  • Most importantly, be vigilant and try to spot the scams above
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