How do you know if your email is safe from potential hackers? What precautionary steps can you take to secure your email address and ramp up your email security game? Find out in this article.
If our online life had a lock, it would be our email address, and email hackers are thieves trying to break and enter your property.
Fortunately, ensuring email security doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Let’s explore simple yet effective ways that you can employ to secure your email address against those pesky email hackers, even with limited tech and cybersecurity knowledge.
Is your email safe from potential hackers?
Here are a few things you can do to check whether or not you’re safe from potential email hackers.
Look for any unrecognized emails
The first and easiest action you can take is to look through your Inbox and Sent folders and see if there are any emails you don’t recognize.
Ask your contacts
See if any of your friends, family, or colleagues receive any suspicious messages coming from your email address.
Use services from your provider
You can also take a further step by using logs, audits, and other functionalities from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 (previously Office 365).
4 ways to secure your email address from email hackers
Now let’s see what preventative steps you can take to level up your email security.
1. Always use strong and secure passwords
The best type of password is the one you can’t even remember. This may sound impossible, but you can easily do it with a password generator and password storage. BitWarden has always been our go-to platform to keep our passwords extra safe 🔒
One more thing: never, ever use the same password more than once on different sites.
2. Use Two Factor Authentication (2FA)
2FA provides a second layer of security requiring manual input of a time-limited, one-time password. So, don’t think of using an authenticator as a burdensome extra step — it’s a security code on your lock.
You can use the authenticator from Google, Microsoft, BitWarden, or others.
3. Get extra protection with DMARC, DKIM & SPF
These email authentication methods help protect your domain against hackers, spammers, and phishers. With DMARC, DKIM, and SPF in action, unauthorized parties who have no access to your email address can’t do anything to abuse it.
4. Detect breaches
Search your email address on Have I Been Pawned to see if it has shown up in any data breaches. It most likely has, and what you can do now is start implementing unique, long, and secure passwords. This is non-negotiable.
Email security: important for all, paramount for companies
It can be easy to ignore email security, use the same password on all sites so you’d never have to click that Forgot password button, underestimate the importance of 2FA, and just want it to be easy anyway.
But remember that your email address is the lock that safeguards your personal data. You don’t want it to be easily hacked and get your data stolen. Just like how you keep your bank accounts secure with passwords, OTPs, and PINs, you should treat your email address the same way.
However, we understand that some of these four ways to secure your email address might seem too complicated for those who have limited tech and cybersecurity knowledge. Worry not, you leave the hard work to us!
Our team of tech experts is ready to help you increase your company’s email security level and protect it against potential email hackers. Schedule a free intro call with us here and we’ll see what company need and how exactly we can assist you.
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