Hours Lost to Spam

Your business is losing hundreds of hours to spam every year. A recent report found that each one of your employees could be losing up to 80 hours every single year to the nuisance emails. Spam not only takes up valuable time, it also decreases productivity and morale, and potentially damages or even destroy your company if someone falls victim to a particularly nasty email.

Up to 85% of emails sent each day are spam. Worryingly, a large proportion of them are malicious emails hoping to infect you with malware or gain access to your computer systems or accounts such as email to send more spam, or even online banking. Suffice to say that spam is much more than just a nuisance, it's a very real and very present danger to the long term profitability of your business, or at it's most dramatic even the very survival of your business.

Freethought recommends a three-pronged approach to managing the threat of spam and malicious email; Prevent, identify, and mitigate.

The first line of defence against spam

Firstly, consider the initial protection of your computer networks by ensuring that adequate spam filtering and threat mitigation is in place and that it is correctly configured to scan for spam and email borne malware. Too often we find poorly configured (or even completely missing!) filtering, that spam is able to simply bypass completely. Effective filtering ensures that the vast majority of malicious emails and spam are stopped before they even reach the inboxes of your staff.

Identify the threat

Secondly, no filtering is 100% effective so plan for some spam mail getting through. Have your staff properly trained and aware of what to look for in their inboxes. Ensure your staff know to not blindly open an email claiming to have an invoice attached that is strangely contained within a ZIP file. Received an email saying your inbox is going to be deactivated unless you login? Think again.

You might even want to reward and incentivise them for finding malicious emails such as phishing attempts. By ensuring staff are cyber security aware and able to think critically and identify a potential threat, you enable them to be the next line of defence so when something slips through the filtering it is stopped before it causes any damage.

Mitigate the threat.

Finally, if a particularly convincing and cleverly engineered malicous email makes it through the filtering, and through your cyber security aware and trained staff, you need to mitigate the damage it can do.

Your computer network should have effective, up-to-date, and managed anti-virus and malware detection installed. Your passwords to critical systems should follow best practice for password security, not be re-used, and doubly protected by multi-factor authentication. Finally, you should have backups of critical data to restore should malware cause data loss through erasure or held ransom. You need to be able to be assured that should the worst happen, your business sytems, data, finances etc are safe, secure, and backed up.

Need some more help?

We know this can be a bit daunting, and for small businesses especially it's hard ot imagine it would impact you. But don't worry, if you need a bit of help understanding and protecting against email threats then get in touch for friendly, practical, and affordable advice to protect you and your business.

Call 03300 882131 or email hello@freethought.services today!

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