Analysis of 1.3M Emails Unveils Hidden Threats Missed by Other Email Security Solutions
Analysis of 1.3M Emails Unveils Hidden Threats Missed by Other Email Security Solutions
How to Send a Secure Email Attachment

How to Send a Secure Email Attachment

Most organizations at one time have lost critical data through the email channel. The data sets include intellectual property, confidential spreadsheets with financial information, and accidental sharing of employee information. Malicious insider threats from disgruntled employees were attempting to copy data to their devices while sending copies of sensitive information to their email accounts. These security incidents are all everyday reality in protecting corporate emails.

Loss violation types and inside risk

Accidental data exposure incidents continue to be on the rise in organizations. Legitimate data loss incidents happen as well due to email security systems that tend to fail open when the protection layer drops.

One of the continuously impactful issues for an organization is the lack of enforcement of the loss prevention policies. Many company compliance officers will draft and amend various information security policies to comply with regulatory compliance mandates. Yet, even with the policy, the ability to optimize and manage the needed adaptive controls for email security faltered over time.

Protecting attachments and data inside of emails

There are many different reasons why people want to send secure email attachments in Gmail or other providers, but they all boil down to one thing: security. Sensitive personal and private information should not be stored on company servers in plaintext because this could result in data leaks or breaches. The same is true for any personal information that could be used to commit fraud or identity theft.

For example, someone who has access to your email address may use it to steal your identity. The human layer within security settings is no guarantee every email and attachment will be protected when the send button is hit. Loss via email impacts the entire organization, not just the sender.

Whether you’re sending sensitive personal information, business information, or anything else that needs to be kept secure and private, knowing when and how to send specific email messages is essential. Using a security tool that encrypts data is essential.

Encryption is a way of scrambling data so that nobody except the sender and the receiver can read it. Local encryption happens on your computer, so the data is encrypted before it travels over the internet. End-to-end encryption ensures that the data cannot easily be read by anyone else, whether in transit or when received by the intended recipient’s email provider.

Enterprises often choose to use secure email gateways, which not only help protect email attachments but also provide additional email security features, including scanning inbound and outbound emails for malware, scanning messages for sensitive data, and blocking the email from going through. This way, they have complete control over the information transmitted via email attachments.

Do we trust our people or the system to protect our data?

How many emails are sent each day globally? Try in the neighborhood of 333.2 Billion. Roughly 1/3 of all emails have attachments, including documents, photos, and video clips. The average person received around 120 per day while sending out.

How will organizations know if clients encrypt email attachments when sending them?

Accidental data loss happens all too often to organizations. 60% of all organizations have suffered an unexpected data loss through the email channel in 2022. Even with the modernization of data loss prevention technology working with encrypted emails, accidentally, data exfiltration happens. Many DLP solutions have become overly complex for both the sender and receiver of the message. Many clients use carrier-based keys like Microsoft 0365 and Google to comply with various compliance standards. Even with those solutions, the gmail users community struggles with content protection controls and wonder how to send secure email in gmail.

Optimizing and simplifying protection for attachments in emails

Enable an effective data loss prevention strategy.

The email with attachments should be encrypted based on the organization’s data loss prevention strategy. All attachments should be processed through OCR scanning for keywords, compliance tagged data fields, and any data classification markings, including confident, secret, and top secret. Culturally, organizations need to make the correction investment in DLP prevention to include:

  • Ease-to-use approach to security for users to comply with
  • Understand that a mistake on email channels will happen in an organization
  • Employee negligence will occur with the most secure email service
  • Risk management needs to be part of the DLP strategy
  • Accidentally data exposure and risky employee behavior prevention need to be part of the strategy

Enable email data loss prevention with ease-of-use management and client usability.

Up until the last few years, backend DLP solutions became overly complex to enable and manage the various keywords, compliance mandated fields, and content format types. Most DLP systems have multiple resources and support from the software manufacturer. This continuous operation became costly and flawed over time for the organization. Yet, even with the complexity of DLP and now CASB, the investments organizations need to make continue to climb. Without an effective DLP strategy to protect client medical records, financial information, and credit card data, organizations will be blocked from conducting business in their specific market and face lawsuits (for failing to comply with data protection laws) and negative impacts on their brand.

  • Users should have the ability to secure emails by encrypting each message on demand
  • SecOps teams should continue to provide security awareness training, simulated email attacks, and continuous learning modules to assist the user community with this critical function.

Strategic DLP enablement across all communication channels

A recent survey by business insurance magazine shows that 48% of employees admit to making common mistakes that compromise email security.

  • 42% of documents contained company research and data
  • 39% had security information like passwords
  • 38% had financial information and client information
  • 36% collected employee data

Email Encryption And DLP – One Solution For Data Loss Prevention

The hacker community knows that most security adaptive controls rarely get fully deployed, except for organizations that spend big dollars outsourcing to an MSSP or MSP service.

The following events are some of the leading causes of data leaks in 2022.

  1. Misconfigured Software Settings.
  2. Social Engineering
  3. Recycled Password usage
  4. Poor Encryption
  5. Software Vulnerabilities
  6. Use of Default Passwords.

Gartner often references in their security reports the challenges of misconfigured security solutions impact expected outcomes of SecOps protection strategies.

Data Loss Prevention identified protected compliance content within the email message in parallel with email encryption. It instilled rules to prevent PII saved data from leaving through the email channel by enacting email encryption to protect information attempting to leave the organization unprotected.

As global privacy compliance is implemented, enterprises should review their controls to ensure proper governance and alignment.

Enterprises should review:

  • Encrypt any email with PII information. Enabling DLP policies as a system-wide adaptive control will ensure all messages that match a privacy rule by encrypting the outbound message
  • The organization needs to enable policies and standards monitoring for risky behavior, external threats, and intentional violation of global compliance mandates. Some of the asymmetric encryption services can add significant friction to the user experience, but they will keep employees from accidentally sharing sensitive data when they send emails.

Trustifi One-Click(™) Email Encryption Solution

The One-Click email encryption option is simple to deploy – administrators just click down a list of boxes, making this a “set-and-forget-it” solution.

Recipients can open an encrypted email right from their inbox and reply securely via a fully encrypted channel with the click of a button. The recipient can also upload any attachments, worry free.

With Trustifi, there is no need for both the sender and the recipient to understand how secure email encryption works, know how to send encrypted emails, or exchange encryption keys. The Trustifi platform has been built from the bottom up to be as straightforward as possible with the most uncomplicated user experience while preventing data loss by securing every email account with encryption.

  • NSA-grade end-to-end email encryption, with complete inbound and outbound protection
  • Secure mobile relay for complete protection on any device
  • Recall, block, modify and set an expiration date for already sent and delivered emails

Why Trustifi?

Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on software as a service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest to use and deploy email security products, providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor.

Email DLP and other loss prevention strategies have been around for several years. Exfiltration events continue to be on the rise across all markets. Many companies, including Proofpoint, Mimecast, and Microsoft, have enabled DLP capabilities for global clients for years. While tools have mixed results of success, the management of DLP tools over time requires continuous evaluation and tuning. Over time, these tools became unmanaged, and their effectiveness. Many organizations only turn on “the basic DLP” rules because of the lack of resources to manage the solution full-time. Hackers know this.

Culture

Trustifi’s email security services feature a comprehensive suite of email tools for advanced threat protection, data loss prevention, and enterprise email encryption. Trustifi’s easy-to-use software is unmatched in its user-friendliness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Trustifi’s time to value, ease of deployment, and lower cost of ownership for SECOPS make the company culture secure and a financial match for any client seeking email security, data exfiltration, and message encryption.

Request A Demo: How to Send a Secure Email Attachment with Trustifi

Whether you’re looking for an extra layer of protection in your existing email environment or a complete suite solution, the expertise and simplicity Trustifi offers will exceed your expectations. Let’s discuss a customized email security plan that fits your needs perfectly.

Document Credit: Mark Liapusti, CISO, Trustifi, and Hadas Ifraimov, Security Researcher, Trustifi

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