I want you all to go grab your favourite marketing person and make them read this post. You know the ones I am talking about. The one that doesn’t understand why they have to take the 3600dpi 8GB PDF that could be blown up to the size of the Empire State Building without looking grainy, and reduce it for sending over email to a customer. The one who came in early last week to send an email blast to a 1000 person customer list that they bought from a guy they know, which resulted in your corporate network being placed on every RDNS blacklist on the planet. The one who doesn’t understand why when he sends an email, the customer doesn’t have it open to read before he lets goes of the mouse. The one whose laptop you secretly want to replace with an Etch-a-Sketch. Continue reading How to Lose Customers and Infuriate People

When starting out, many small businesses set up their email using one of the free accounts available to them. Services like Gmail by Google, Hotmail from Microsoft or Yahoo!’s mail service, provide a working email address with almost no maintenance for a business just getting its feet wet.

However this may not be the best way to make a first impression with your potential customers.

Listed below are seven reasons why you need to ditch the yourcompany@freeemail.com and go with an address that better reflects the image you want your company to have. Continue reading 7 Reasons to Ditch That Free Email Address

If your organization is part of a regulated industry, is publicly traded, or has business units that might need to engage in different operations that could present a conflict of interest, you may find yourself tasked with deploying an ethical wall within your Exchange organization. While it may sound intimidating, it is actually an easy and straightforward task which Exchange handles well. This post will discuss ethical walls, and then show you how to set them up with Exchange 2010.

In business or legal terms, ethical walls (sometimes called Chinese walls) are communication and information barriers set up between individuals or business units to ensure that no information or communication can be exchanged between parties. They can be required when a business has competing interests, like when a financial company has a group A that advises businesses and is privy to sensitive information, and has a group B that advises others on investments. If A is working on something that could impact stock prices and is not public information, B could take advantage of that information to the benefit of their clients, which would be considered insider trading and highly illegal. It’s also common to find ethical walls within law firms, should two different attorneys in the same firm find themselves representing the interests of different parties.

Continue reading Inside Exchange: Ethical Walls

When you don’t understand something that your job requires you to know, the most logical thing to do is research the topic and learn as much as you can about it. For many people who find security as part of their job description, learning as you go is the only option available. Yet despite the fact that there is so much information readily available to us, misconceptions regarding email security still confuse many professionals tasked with maintaining the confidentiality, integrity and availability of email services. Continue reading Misconceptions About Email Security

When looking at solutions on securing email, many people don’t take into consideration the type of business environment they work in. All too often, after spending a great amount of time and money, small to medium-sized enterprises find out that what works for a company the size of Bank of America doesn’t quite work for them.

To better help SMBs find solutions scaled to their needs when it comes to email security, I have compiled a list of 5 tips that address the risks and restraints that they face. Continue reading 5 Essential Tips for SMB Email Security

When Epsilon Data Management disclosed a breach of its email system panic struck cyberspace. Names like JP Morgan Chase, Citi Bank, Staples, Verizon and Hilton were listed as some of the customer databases that had been compromised as a result.

As many customers of these companies started receiving emails explaining that their email was exposed in the breach and could be used in illicit activities, email administrators starting looking at what they could learn as a result of this catastrophe.

Continue reading Lessons We Should Learn From Epsilon

Advanced persistent threats make email security a necessity

Most email administrators consider security to be a large part of what they do. With so many laws and regulations governing the storage, discovery and retrieval of email messages, security has become a second job to many.

Unfortunately, many administrators either forget, or simply aren’t aware, that securing email requires much more effort than hardening the email servers against attack. In order to fully protect your organization’s email and their contents the mailbox also needs to be defended. Especially when you consider how popular Advanced Persistent Threats are becoming with large cyber crime syndicates who use email not only as a way to harvest sensitive information, but also as a method of attack through phishing and social engineering. Continue reading Tips for Better Email Security

In just one week Google, the International Monetary Fund and Citigroup have all made headlines as a result of email associated with them being under attack. The reason we continue to see companies make the news as a result of email attacks is that email security is sometimes ignored when it comes to training users properly and making good decisions. In some cases, having the latest and greatest when it comes to security tools even creates a false sense of security that causes us, and our users, to overlook the little things. A multi-layered defense that has been properly configured with all the best technology can be rendered useless if the little things are forgotten.

Continue reading 5 Simple Mistakes When it Comes to Email Security

All of us know how critical email is in business today. We realise how dangerous this mission critical communications channel can be to the company and how many risks to our information systems email can present. We do everything we can to secure ourselves against the threat of incoming email; we scan for malware, we scan for spam. We use filters at our borders, and we parse lists of sender addresses to reduce the chance that an email carrying a threat will get into our systems.

But what about outbound mail? Do we do anything at all about outgoing mail? Do we look at it as a potential threat, or do we trust it implicitly, since, after all, it was generated internally by one of our users? Scanning outbound email for malware is just good security sense. The embarrassment and ill well a company could incur sending an infected email to a customer is one aspect. Another is leakage of sensitive information. Data Loss Prevention looks at the ways to protect information from loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, with an emphasis on ensuring that mission critical information does not leak to the outside world. Email, being the largest source of outbound information most companies experience is a key area to focus on in your Data Loss Prevention efforts.

Continue reading Scanning outbound email could save your company millions

Email administrators can add compliance to their list of growing costs on their budgets, according to a report released recently by the Security for Business Innovation Council, which is a group of security executives from companies in the Global 1000.

The report, “A New Era of Compliance: Raising the Bar for Organizations Worldwide,” maintained that a new compliance landscape is forming, one that will be driving up costs and risks for businesses around the world.

“As the compliance landscape gets more complex, demonstrating compliance gets more time consuming and costly,” it said.

Four trends were identified in the report as factors driving organizations to take their security responsibilities more seriously than they have in the past.

1. Strengthened enforcement.
2. Global spread of data breach notification laws.
3. Increasingly prescriptive regulations.
4. Growing business partner requirements.

Continue reading Compliance driving up security costs, report says