Here’s why email poses a significant cyber threat to your business

Emails aren’t secure and there is no commercial solution in the marketplace to address this. Here’s why:

There are two obvious points of vulnerability with respect to email: the recipient and the sender. Most malware is designed to penetrate email accounts and as we have mentioned in previous blogs, it is becoming increasingly easy to guess passwords.

The less obvious, but equally vulnerable points of entry for a hacker are the network and the server. Just say your service is Outlook.com and you send an email to someone using gmail, which are two typical email providers for small businesses. Each connection between email providers involves multiple switchers and routers which are controlled by different entities. It only takes one of the networks to be vulnerable in order to expose your sensitive email to a third party hacker. Similarly, the ISP’s store your email on servers that are also constantly under hacker attack. As a general rule, ISP’s do not spend the resources to encrypt the emails that are stored to their servers.

There are some companies with promising technologies to enable encryption, but at this point, we have not seen a solution that addresses the fundamental vulnerabilities described in this blog posting.

HAAS (Hacking as a Service)

Radio Five Live covered a report this morning which has ‘unveiled’ the fact that hackers and cyber-criminals can now buy a range of online services (made by other hackers) which are aimed at making their malicious activities easier to carry out…..and also make the spread of the hack more effective.

The promotion of these services is surprisingly sophisticated.  To help get your head around this level of cyber-crime, it’s worth watching this brief video of James Lyne of Sophos talking about HaaS – or Hacking as a Service – at a TSG event earlier this year:

The expert they spoke to on Five Live also mentioned the importance of keeping your software up to date with the latest patches – one of a number of simple, common sense steps that you can take to protect your business.

For more of these steps we’ve posted some ‘top tips’ videos on our

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