A Guide to Email Security: Training to Keep Your Team and Business Secure

The security field is far from the concerns of most of your employees, but that fact could be where malicious threats thrive.

A lot of the time, breaches and attacks are successful simply due to a lack of knowledge – due to a mistake that could have been avoided with the proper training. That is the case regarding email security, phishing scams, and similar areas. Therefore, to understand the kinds of risks that risks pose, training your whole team can make that knowledge comprehensive and your business more secure.

Access to Business Email Addresses

The difficulty is how many of your employees might have access to your business email addresses. They all operate from inside your professional boundaries and receive potentially dangerous emails. Any staff members within your network might then become targets of these kinds of threats, which can be distressing due to the sheer number of vulnerabilities that this might open up.

You need to understand the situation in depth to fully gauge how much of a problem this might be for your business and what you can do about it. Once that has been done, you can begin to patch up the problems as they emerge, addressing each so that you can turn your staff’s widespread access to business email networks back into something positive.

Different Levels of Online Awareness

One of the most significant variables you might immediately encounter is how easily different people can spot suspicious emails. Not everyone you hire is going to have the same level of online awareness or familiarity – even when that is something that’s part of the job. Typically, this might be something you see along a generational line, where younger people are more familiar with what to expect and potential signs of what to mistrust online, but this won’t always be the case. 

The fact is, when you have to teach your new hires, you’re inevitably going to make assumptions here or there – including about their capability to handle potential malicious emails. Every single employee you hire will be coming at this job with a different level of exposure here; however, this means that perhaps you can’t take any chances to bring people up to speed. 

The Scale of the Problem

Of course, even the ability to detect suspicious emails is not guaranteed, as such methods are constantly evolving. This means you must consider multiple variables and address a large-scale issue affecting a significant portion of your staff. With this in mind, it becomes clear just how broad your approach must be to take effective action. 

Worst of all, total reassurance may be impossible due to the ever-present risks and uncertainties. Mistakes happen, meaning solutions like this are rarely foolproof. Because of these factors, ‘good enough’ may be the most practical goal, given the inherent role of human error.

Understanding the Risks

To begin with, getting a sense of how you can train your staff is essential, as it’s important to paint a more vivid picture of what you’re up against. One thing is knowing what to look out for, but what does that even mean? What are the risks? How do such threats work? What should people do if they are uncertain? 

These risks are essential for you to understand so that you can begin to design effective training for your staff – training that will hopefully convey this understanding to them. After all, while it is all good to follow instructions, having employees develop a sense of their own can mean that they can better apply their wisdom to situations that arise.

Decoy Emails

As mentioned, spotting a spam or dangerous email is becoming more complex. These decoy emails are being sent out with increased efficiency, with multiple methods behind them to try and fool whoever is reading them. 

Sometimes, it is about creating a general message to apply to at least one person reading it, while other times, email accounts may become hacked to try and appear more familiar to the reader. While people might use questionable spelling, grammar, or obvious red flags (like asking for sensitive information) to determine whether to trust an email, such signs won’t always be present.

Suspicious Links

One red flag that can sometimes require more scrutiny is the presence of suspicious links in the body of the text. In many business contexts, this could be a perfectly ordinary course of action, which might not make people think twice about opening such a link—especially if the aforementioned point about the sender's identity being misleading is also true. 

While it might feel natural to have everyone thoroughly read and reread every email to be sure that it is legitimate before clicking on a link, it comes back to the point of not being able to assure results 100% of the time. This might be the go-to process, but a lot of the time, people will be doing their jobs in a more automatic frame of mind, making it easier to miss well-disguised emails like this. 

It is the nature of the links – what they are asking of people and whether that makes sense within the context of their work or a broader conversation that people might want to look out for.

Attachments

The same is true of attachments. Again, it can feel perfectly ordinary in a business context for emails to have PDFs attached to them, but this can be a way for phishing scams or malicious attacks to take hold of your business. 

The file name itself might draw your employees’ attention, but once again, the context in the body of the text and any discrepancies with the email address itself is worth paying attention to. There will also be some email providers that take the liberty of scanning such attachments to make sure that they don’t contain anything negative before they’re opened. 

Security Approaches

Of course, while introducing a thorough training scheme on navigating the online world safely can help reduce many risks, that is not going to be all you can rely on due to the previously mentioned uncertainty. You might not be willing to leave that to chance, meaning taking a multi-faceted approach that encompasses a robust cybersecurity defense. 

A lot of this will then come down to working with your security team or consulting with experts, but doing your own research can also help lead you to solutions you might not have previously considered. The OSI model can offer you a greater level of network communication, for example, and that, in turn, can give you a greater insight into the kinds of risks that might be permeating your network. Having multiple different lines of defense against the potential threats trying to worm their way into your business can increase your confidence in your ability to work effectively.

Approaches to Training

So, when it comes to conveying information to staff to help them avoid these kinds of risks, you have a few different options. Staff training might be nothing new to your business, and it could just be a matter of incorporating one more topic into the rotation. 

The basics of how this information is conveyed are important; however, it is up to you to consider it daily for staff. When you already feel as though there is so much that you want to convey to your team in a way that they will permanently adopt, introducing new, more urgent information can threaten to make other forms of training redundant. 

eLearning

You might have introduced much of this training through eLearning. This is an excellent way for staff to absorb important information on their own time and during work. It also enables you or other managers to update the portals with everything that they need to know.

This is great in this particular instance because it means that should you decide it is vital for your team to have a refresher on email security, that’s something that you can include in the rotation. This also gives you an idea of who has undergone the training and who’s even completed some sort of quiz at the end to a satisfactory level. This can make you feel more comfortable about the ability of any given team member to apply this knowledge throughout the day, and it can also tell you who needs to follow up to complete the training to cover as many of your bases as possible.

Heads Up

If your attention has been brought to many of these incidents recently, you might think that the approach you want to take is more of a one-time PSA. Sending out an email or just calling everyone’s attention to a quick description and example of what to look out for might help people feel more alert in this regard – conscious that this is something to look out for now. This might be different from the effect that eLearning can have, which could have people filing it away under one of the many things they learn about at work that they assume will never come up.

More Focused Meetings

However, A brief alert might not draw the kind of attention you are hoping for. If it is something that people see on their computer while they’re working, they might be just as quick to dismiss that as they would any kind of non-urgent email (even if you’ve flagged it as urgent). There can be a lack of immediacy to it, which ultimately casts it in a different light than what you are hoping for. 

The other approach is to draw everyone relevant into a more focused digital or physical meeting. The latter might be difficult if your business is expansive to the point where many people have relevant business email addresses. Still, it can also give the message you are trying to convey a more pronounced sense of memorability.

Final Thoughts

Email security is an essential component of protecting your business from cyber threats. By training employees to recognize phishing scams, suspicious links, and malicious attachments, you can reduce risks significantly. Combining training with robust security measures and proactive monitoring will create a safer email environment. Cyber threats will always evolve, but with continuous awareness and vigilance, your team can stay ahead of potential dangers and keep your business secure.