SystemsNet Blog

Tag Archives: email security

“Good Morning IT, I think I lost my phone” Avoid the worry when situations like this arise

July 23, 2015Securityemail security, Mobile Security, network securitySystemsNet Administrator

Where did I have my phone last?

It’s a Monday morning and this is your first phone call: “Good Morning, I think I lost my phone over the weekend. It has all my corporate email including patient information, on the device. I’ve looked everywhere for it.” What’s the first thing IT will do? Wipe the device in order to protect corporate data to avoid a data security breach.

Now it is Tuesday morning and that same employee calls, “Good Morning, I found my phone under the couch. Can you restore it? I have a video of my daughter’s first steps on there.” Too late—there is no way to get that data back. Now you have an unhappy employee who will think twice about ever calling IT when a device is lost (or misplaced). Let’s not forget the effect this will have on other employees hearing about this event.

So what’s the solution? You need a BYOD solution that leaves data off the device and allows employees to maintain control of their personal data. That is exactly what ZixOne does.

ZixOne is a mobile email app that allows employees access to their corporate email. Data is never downloaded to the device so IT departments never have to worry about managing multiple copies of the data. With just one click, access to their email can be stopped. So when an employee loses (or thinks they’ve lost) their device, or even leaves the company for another job, you can simply cut off access to corporate email.

Here’s the other great part—because there is no corporate data ever on the device, the phone never needs to be wiped. If the employee finds their phone after they believe it to be lost, all of that information will still be there.

You also eliminate any corporate legal liability associated with having insight into employees’ personal information. If you can prove you can’t see their personal data, how can they hold you liable?

ZixOne is a solution that meets everyone’s needs and it is built by the industry leader in email encryption, Zix, and they know email security.

With so many businesses implementing BYOD, there needs to be tools in the IT help desk to protect a companies data. For more information about ZixOne, please contact us today.

Email Archiving (2 Part Series) – The Risk of Having Email Archived on a Local Workstation

June 1, 2014Securityemail organization, email safety, email security, email solutionsSystemsNet

Email archiving is an extremely efficient solution for dealing with large volumes of email. Even the smallest business can have thousands of emails every year they have to sift through. Think about what would happen if you had a multinational corporation.

Archiving emails is required by companies for both legal and regulatory reasons. Some information has to be stored for a certain period of time; usually about three years.

Local workstations are often used to store emails. This is a major security flaw. You’re risking everything by leaving a security loophole like this in place. To make matters even worse, only 32% of organizations have a data loss solution, according to SilverSky.

Here’s why you need to be careful about where your archive your emails.

Your Responsibility

A local workstation is vulnerable. Unless you’ve employed a team of security consultants to take care of your security, you’re vulnerable. Many corporations aren’t willing to do this, and so they hand the responsibility to a third-party specialist who can offer them a centralized location for archiving.

Taking responsibility for an archive like this reduces efficiency and increases how much you pay. And there’s still no guarantee of a hacker or other malicious virus not slipping through your nets.

Employee Security Failure

To make it even worse, a localized workstation exposes your emails to the greatest threat of all – the people already in your company. Take a look at some more startling statistics from SilverSky:

1. 78% of employees have accessed their emails from personal devices. There’s nothing stopping them from doing this because emails have been archived on localized workstations. They haven’t been hosted or stored on a large central computer.

2. 61% of employees have taken data away from their companies through emails in order to provide leverage for them to find another job. They have a real incentive to exploit security loopholes like this one, especially if you’re dealing with a disgruntled employee.

What’s the Solution?

Take email archives away from localized workstations. The fact is too many companies aren’t taking email security seriously. They automatically assume it’s a secure part of their network. Whilst they worry about antivirus systems, malicious attacks are being made through their emails.

Another factor you have to take into account is the sheer scale of email archives. Try to find a solution for reviewing the archives regularly. Instead of storing everything, store only what you’re bound to keep by law. Delete whatever you have no use for, but do it in a manner that’s secure.

In conclusion, email archiving is a great solution, but it’s also allowed for new methods of attack. Take your security seriously and ensure nobody manages to take advantage of this so often exploited security flaw.

Email Archiving – The Benefits of Centralized Email Archiving

May 15, 2014Securityemail organization, email security, email solutionsSystemsNet

email icon The Radicati Group say there are 850 million corporate accounts across the world, and the average user sends about 110 messages each day. You need a lot of space to store these emails, or 30MB per user per week to be exact.

What’s the solution?

It’s email archiving, obviously. The problem with email archiving is too many people are storing their archives on a local workstation. They’re exposing themselves with this massive security risk. Localized workstations are vulnerable and can be attacked. It’s a common theme to see attacks being made through less secure localized workstations.

Instead, you need to search for a centralized email archive solution. It enhances your security and ensures you’re doing your duty to limit the potential for network breaches.

Removing the Holes

A centralized archive puts everything in a single location. It means there’s one location and one location only were an attacker would have to breach security. Spreading your archives around local workstations only provides additional opportunities for leaks. It’s simply a matter of numbers.

You’re spreading your resources thin by not opting for a centralized archive.

Easy Organization

Before the concept of centralized email archiving appeared, it was typical to store emails across multiple departments of a corporation. An office may have their own email archive, along with the office next to them, and the office after that.

Centralized archives will store everything in the same place in separate folders. This makes it easy to locate specific emails. It’s ideal when dealing with clients or regulatory boards because any information can be called up in a matter of minutes in a safe and secure manner.

Synchronized Security

Security solutions have to be updated on a consistent basis. It’s a huge job to do this across multiple departments. A lack of synchronized security means for a short time part of a company’s emails are protected, whereas the others are vulnerable. Can you imagine having to update your antivirus system section by section?

This doesn’t happen. You press a button and it updates everything at the same time. With a centralized email archive you can have this level of synchronized security. It’s safer for your network.

Space Saving

As well as reducing the number of access points, as described above, centralized email archives save space. They’re less bulky and take up less digital space. For any business of any size, they cost less. Anything that reduces the amount you pay will always be worthwhile for a business to invest in.

Conclusion

In short, what you have with centralized email archiving is better security and more efficiency. There’s no reason why localized workstations should play a part in an archiving solution. With the costs of a security breach running so high, it’s not worth the risk. Take control of your email security and make sure you don’t fall victim to a digital attack.

Spam, Where Does it Come From and What Can We Do About It?

May 1, 2014Securityemail safety, email security, junk email, spam emailSystemsNet

spam Spam is the bane of the Internet. We’ve all received a spam email before offering instant weight loss and the enlargement of various sexual organs. It’s a problem and causes real harm to the digital economy. It’s part of the reason people are so wary about using the Internet and opening emails.

According to Microsoft, they block an average of 2.4 billion spam messages every day. And these figures are replicated amongst other major international corporations. Even the average home user will have multiple spam emails blocked each day.

Spam filters have improved over the years. Most spam will never make it into the average user’s inbox these days. It’s become a significantly less important problem as technology has advanced.

Promotional and Actual Spam

Most spam comes from inferior quality marketing companies selling bogus services. They’ll often operate on behalf of companies as a marketing firm. These companies often don’t realize these firms are spamming for them on their behalf.

In other cases, the companies themselves are spamming. They’d rather spam a thousand users in the hope of getting one user to click on the email and buy whatever they’re selling.

More sinister spam will encourage you to click a link. When you click a link it will steal your personal information by installing key loggers and various viruses. These can then be used to take your private information.

In short, spam always comes from someone trying to make a quick buck from the Internet.

What you need to understand is spam is malicious. Some items, like promotional emails, can be referred to as spam, but they aren’t true spam.

Spam Filters

Thankfully, most users don’t have to make a conscious effort to block spam any longer. Unless you’re a major target for it, your email provider’s spam filter will often be enough to keep out most problematic emails.

Spam hasn’t changed much in the last ten years. They still use the same tactics, and this makes it easy for even the cheapest filter to have a considerable effect on the number of messages you receive.

What Can You Do About It?

If the default spam filters you get with an average email account aren’t good enough, you can usually find a spam filter through your antivirus program. As long as you have a comprehensive antivirus solution, there’s no reason why you should receive any spam at all.

There are some actions you can take to reduce the damage by modifying your behaviour, though, such as:

Don’t open spam emails, even to have a look.
Don’t reply with an angry rant. The chances are there’s nobody reading their inbox.
Avoid publishing your full email address online. Keep a business email address for your clients and a disposable email address for everything else.
Use the blacklist and whitelist options in your account wisely.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email providers alike both have incentives to prevent spam. Whilst it isn’t the menace it used to be, this remains a problem you can’t afford to ignore.