Ways To Secure Your Email Address From Prying Eyes

Electronic Mail is popularly known as email or e-mail, the common form of web communication for exchanging digital messages from a writer/sender to one or more recipients/receivers. Email is the identity for various confidential, professional and personal data hence there are masterminds who want to control it through the click of button-The technical thief commonly known as “The Hacker”. Once hacked, your email can be used for anything on the web. The task for the hacker is just a few codes and click away to pilfer personal data acquired through an online bank account credit/Debit card information Venmo themselves a lump sum of your money to a fake account and then cash out. Apart from banking fraud technical thief can spam your friends via email and social media in an attempt to steal even more information. The victims of a cyberattack are on upward graph year on year basis. It high time that common man should not take privacy and security of inboxes for granted.

An email account is a ubiquitous store lots of data hence secure email practices must be a priority for everyone. Based on what we know about attacks, implementing these simple steps can curtail exposure to email attacks.

Prevention of Phishing-Think twice before clicking on the emails from legitimate look-alike website in your inbox as in reality it’s fake. Clicking on such links share all your details attached with email id. Make sure you always check the authenticity ofURL in the Browser before Signing IN to your Account through such links in your inbox. Do not ever click suspicious links in emails.

Security Manager-Don’t compromise sensitive data. Periodically update email address which is associated with your accounts. This will help in asking for re-authorization of accounts were ever logged in past, to re-login and keep your email more safe to use. Deleting email is a waste of time hence set an expiration dateso that after a certain date, it will no longer be readable by the recipient

The Added layer of security- Follow two-factor authentication (2FA)- The functioning for two-factor authentication is simple: it combines something you know with something you have with you and pin generated on the second device is valid for the limited time span. By enabling two-step verification, you are not only putting all of your trust in a password but also putting a hacker with your password simply out of luck as the only knowing password will not let them access your account.

Enforce password security-Create unique password with punctuation, numeric characters, both upper and lower case characters, Minimum length of at least seven characters which successfully proves to be the first line of defense. Periodically update the password to keep hacker protected account in the long run.

Send encrypted email- Such a technique simply means power over who gets to see it. You can jumble up your messages make impossible to open such emails unless you clearly authorize someone to read them— and you can revoke that permission at any time. This is done by taking your email message and applying a coding scheme to scramble the message into an unreadable format while it’s being transmitted. A public key, common for every one used to encrypt the messages. A personal/private key is used to decrypt and is private to the sender and the designated recipients. Every day, on an average half a trillion spam messages are shared and many messages contain viruses that are designed to infect a network or a computer hence you will need to encrypt your emails to protect yourself against viruses and other email attacks.

Limit forwarding-Keep track of your forward chain, Think about the consequences when you click “Forward”.Think Where is the message going? Who will see it? Where will it be stored? If your email is hosted on a corporate server, as a policy implement certain security measures in place to protect any sensitive information about forwarding through company email and server

Raises the bar on securing your information- Strong and reliableantivirus system, Up-to-date operating system installed for all machines

Secure your router and Wi-Fi –The home user or a small business owner, identifying on your network type is important, as unauthorized users could be trying to hack into your system. Ensure you periodically change the admin password for your router and set your Wi-Fi password to something really strong that a hacker could not crack. Implement work rules like never allow any business email accounts to be opened by yourself or your employees at a public location, not allowed to access business email accounts from unsecured devices and use a trusted VPN system in order to connect to the internet.

Email may not have been designed to be secure, but users with the implementation of a few workarounds can secure their highly sensitive information. Taking these few extra steps may not keep the spam out of your inbox, but it will help to put hacking attempts into the junk folder for sure.