6 Tips to Help Keep Your Email Secure In 2019

6 Tips to Help Keep Your Email Secure In 2019

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Keeping your emails safe is not a precaution for the email address itself. It is a best practice you should seek to incorporate into your daily living and lifestyle if you are truly wanting to keep all of your other accounts safe.

Why do we say so?

There is rarely any account you would open today which would not require that you use an email address or the other. That said, you have a lot of accounts riding on that email address of yours – and here are some tips on making it a Fort Knox on its own.

1 Employ Secure Passwords

It almost hurts to see the sheer number of users who do not give the security of their passwords any thought at all. They seem to have set the first thing that came to their minds and forgot all about it. This is the kind of behavior that makes hacking such an account a walk in the park.

When choosing your passwords, ensure:

●       They do not contain any personally identifying details (such as age, date of birth, pet’s name, etc.). That is why we recommend using an online password generation tool.

●       Never use the same password for more than one account. That way, a single hack will not snowball into a breach of your email account too.

●       Don’t share your passwords with anyone

●       Store your passwords safely with a password manager if they are too complex to remember – as they should be, especially if you have used the password generator we recommenced.

2 Use SSL/ TLS

Short for Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security respectively, these two protocols will add an extra layer of encryption and security to your email account. The advantage of TLS is that it not only encrypts the mail you are sending from your own server but the receiving server too so that any and all messages are not at risk of being intercepted.

3 Beware of Links

Phishing attacks are the grandfather of all social engineering-based hacks, and they are becoming increasingly popular via email addresses.

The truth is that many email service providers are cracking down on these attacks by identifying bad links and sending them to your spam even before you see them. However, they cannot get all of these links out of your inbox.

Thus, we recommend staying away from clicking links from your email. Should you get an email from a service you use (work, financial, health, etc.), we advise that you enter their address in your browser’s address bar by yourself.

4 Beware of Attachments

Especially when they come unsolicited from the sender, it is advisable that you stay away from opening these attachments at all.

Hackers have found ways to install trojans, keyloggers, ransomware and such other pieces of malware in attachments. Should you open infected files on your computer, you have instantly exposed yourself to the risk posed by the malware in question.

As an alternative to this, we recommend that you scan the files with your email service’s in-built virus scanning software before opening it. Even at that, it is preferable to open the attachment via the email service’s in-built function for such documents too, rather than downloading it onto your computer.

5 Install an Antivirus

Due to the rise of malware-infected attachments in the email, antivirus software is also very important to your security. They could be linked to work with your email accounts so that they can scan and vet all attachments coming in before you open them.

Likewise, you could opt to run the downloaded attachment though the antivirus first before opening it at all.

In all you do, ensure the antivirus software is always kept up to date. Otherwise, you risk falling prey to the latest virus definitions that you didn’t have on the software at the time.

6 Have Different Accounts

A wise saying goes ‘never put all your eggs in one basket,’ and the same is true for email security. In the opening section of this piece, we mentioned how much we depend on emails to open online accounts these days. This means a breach of an email account could open the doorway into your online accounts too.

This does not have to be so.

By simply opening multiple accounts, you can spread your online accounts across the different email addresses you have. Fortunately, smart devices these days allow you to store more than one email address and manage it effectively from anywhere in the world. What do you have to lose?

Conclusion

No matter how you look at it, beefing up your email security is one of the important things you should have done yesterday. If you have not started yet, today is just as good as any other day to try.