Enterprise Email Infrastructure: Security Baseline and Best Practices
The Importance of Secured Enterprise Email Infrastructure
Email is a critical communication tool for enterprises, but it also represents a significant vulnerability. Cyber threats such as phishing, spoofing, and malware attacks often exploit email systems, making robust email security essential. Securing enterprise email infrastructure protects sensitive data, ensures business continuity, and maintains organizational reputation.
Current Global Standards for Email Security
The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has defined a set of protocols through multiple RFCs (Request for Comments) that provide global standards to be adopted by enterprises as security baselines to be compliant in their email infrastructure.
These are:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework) - defined in RFC: 7208
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) - defined in RFC: 7489
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) - defined in RFC: 4871
- MTA-STS (Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security) - defined in RFC: 8461
- ARC Seal (Authenticated Received Chain) - defined in RFC: 8617
These baselines enable mechanisms by which enterprises can - not only secure their own employees from potential targeted attacks via email, - but also maintain their own domain's reputation by ensuring email integrity - i.e., emails sent from their domains are delivered to the intended recipients without being altered along the way - and preventing domain impersonation by external attackers.
Why Securing Enterprise Email Infrastructure is Important
Since Enterprise Email services are the gateway of inbound and outbound communications, securing the service is critical to protect against various cyber threats. It ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of email communications, which are vital for business operations. A robust email security framework can prevent data breaches, protect sensitive information, and maintain the trust of clients and partners.
A secured email infrastructure can also protect against an email based targeted ransomware kind of an attack which could create major losses for entire organizations if it finds it way into the company infrastructure through a link shared via an Email.
Recent Example of Email Security Breach
A notable example of a security breach due to poorly configured email security is the 2020 Twitter hack. Attackers gained access to internal systems by using social engineering techniques and compromising email accounts of employees. The breach led to the takeover of high-profile Twitter accounts, causing significant financial and reputational damage. This incident highlights the importance of robust email security measures and continuous monitoring to protect against sophisticated cyber threats.
In the next section we shall begin with detailing the global security baselines along with how you can implement them.