Sensitive information is often exposed in email incidents. To avoid reputation damage and financial loss, your business should be encrypting emails.
The Case for Encrypting Emails
Email is extensively used in business and a great deal of sensitive information is sent via email. If that information is exposed it can be a source of embarrassment, but far worse, data exposures can result in significant financial losses and can seriously damage trust and reputation. Emails need to be protected to ensure information contained therein remains confidential and to ensure the integrity of the messages. To do that, businesses need to use encryption technology.
Email transmission is not secure. An email can have four stopovers on its way from the sender to the recipient, and the email can be intercepted at any one point in that journey. Since unencrypted emails are transmitted in plaintext, if they are intercepted, they can be viewed and potentially altered.
According to Radicati research, 320 million emails were sent each day in 2021 and the figure is predicted to rise to 347 million a day next year. Given the high number of transmitted emails, it is perhaps no surprise that the UK’s Information Commissioners Office has reported that email data is the biggest contributor to security incidents.
Those security incidents are a combination of the interception of emails, the hijacking of email accounts, and accidental email exposures, where employees sent emails to the incorrect person. A study by Tessian indicates 58% of employees have sent an email to the wrong person. Email cyberattacks involve phishing to gain access to credentials, the use of credentials obtained in previous data breaches, and the hijacking of the DNS MX record, which is used to direct emails to a web server.
Phishing attacks and email account compromises can be tackled with an advanced spam filter such as SpamTitan, strong password policies, and multifactor authentication. Email hacking and interception can prevent email hijacking, email interception, email tampering, and email exposure through misdirection.
How Does Encrypting Emails Work?
Encrypting emails will ensure that the content of the messages, which includes the message body and any attachments, will be rendered unintelligible from the moment they are sent to them being opened and read by the intended recipient. Email encryption typically works using two layers of encryption, as is the case with EncryptTitan – TitanHQ’s email encryption solution.
An encryption protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS) is used to prevent interception in transit, such as a man-in-the-middle attack. TLS email encryption is easy to use and does not require any additional steps if TLS-Verify is used. While TLS will protect emails in transit, a second layer of security is needed to ensure end-to-end encryption of the messages. When the message arrives at its intended destination there is the highest risk of being accessed by an unauthorized individual. Therefore, it is important for the recipient to authenticate to decrypt the email, to ensure that only the intended recipient can open the message.
EncryptTitan from TitanHQ
Solutions for encrypting emails need to be robust to ensure message confidentiality, but also easy to use. Solutions such as EncryptTitan have multi-layered security to ensure emails are protected in transit and can only be decrypted by the intended recipient, without making the sending of messages cumbersome, which would have a negative effect on productivity.
EncryptTitan includes Outlook plugins to make encrypting encryption as easy as possible. The security settings will dictate the amount of additional verification that is required, with the highest setting requiring the use of a one-time unique verification code that is delivered through the encryption portal. Not all emails need to be encrypted. When you send an email, if the recipient is not within the company domain, the sender will receive a one-click prompt asking them if they want to encrypt the message.
When encrypting emails, EncryptTitan ensures attachments are also encrypted by default and the Data Loss Protection (DLP) feature scans for certain keywords and will automatically encrypt emails if they contain sensitive data.
EncyptTitan offers sender-defined email expiry dates, after which the email will be deleted from the TitanHQ Secure Portal, and the option of recalling messages if sent to the incorrect recipient. Setup is easy. There is no need to set up on-site hardware, as encryption takes place in the cloud, which makes the solution highly scalable. The solution is also agnostic of the email environment and will work across a wide range of email environments.
If you want to ensure that your company’s emails are protected against interception and tampering, contact TitanHQ for more information about EncryptTitan and to book a free product demonstration. The solution can also be offered as-a-service with ease by managed service providers who want to provide email encrypting services to their clients.