Email Protection

WHAT IS EMAIL AND INTERNET PROTECTION MANAGEMENT?

Every person in New Zealand falls into 2 categories: those who can remember life before email and the internet, and those who have always known it. Since the 1990s email has been an integral component of our everyday life, enabling instant, free (on the face of it) communication – both through server-based (the standard office) and cloud-based (like ‘Hotmail’ or ‘Gmail’) systems.

Email basically solves 2 problems of communication: logistics and synchronisation.  Most business relies on communication between 2 parties not in close proximity, and often large distances or even countries part.  Email is the fastest and cheapest means available to facilitate such contact.  And when businesses are communicating by phone or meetings, everyone involved has to work to the same schedule and spend the same amount of time in the meeting. Email enables participants to work independently in their own schedules. Unsurprisingly – it has been (and will be for some time) the key communication tool of choice globally. A 2010 study on workplace, found that 83% of U.S. knowledge workers felt that email was critical to their success and productivity at work.

While email’s positive impact on our ability to communicate at work and home has been massive and revolutionary, it has also come with five major threats to it’s utility.

1. EMAIL BOMBARDMENT: huge amounts of email are sent to a specific address with the malicious intention of overwhelming the mailbox/server
2. SPAM: unsolicited commercial sending of emails en masse. The small cost of email means spammers can send hundreds of millions of emails per day at very low cost.
3. PHISHING: an email attempting to procure valuable information (i.e. usernames, passwords, credit cards #s) from the recipient – usually by masquerading as a trusted party like a bank
4. EMAIL VIRUSES: computer program which can replicate and spread from one computer to many. It also refers to a variety of different malware  - worms ( use email to enter and replicate into other computers on the network through security vulnerability – the harm done is usually to the network), Trojan Horses (an apparently benign software that seems to have a beneficial application but actually steals information or harms the system steals information) rootkits, spyware, adware..)
5. EMAIL HACKING: email used as a conduit for a hacker to break into a computer or network and undertake (usually) malicious actions

Likewise – we now literally live in the Internet age, where both in business and our personal lives it is inconceivable not to have access. The unfettered access to information it enables and communication in an ever-more sophisticated manner (i.e. social networking) is a prerequisite for a business to survive in the modern age.

Internet access also creates a range of vulnerabilities for business, from the miscellany of viruses as above, and with the additional issue of user behaviour, whereby staff with access may abuse the privilege for un-approved personal use, or (wittingly or otherwise) download information harmful for the user’s computer and/or entire network. This is where Email and Internet protection comes in.

A strategically planned layer of protection keeps most, not if all the potentially devastating factors mentioned above out of your network, and this is especially so of a ‘cloud’ based system, intercepting potentially/actually damaging data from even getting anywhere near your network.

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