2025 Cybersecurity Guidebook Chapter 5: The Importance of Email Security
Our managing partner, Dustin Bolander, sat down to discuss the importance of email security. This conversation has been lightly edited. You can read a summary below or watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/eRNMgzQc5OU
Trey: This week we are touching on the importance of securing your email and best practices around that!
Dustin: There are a couple different pieces to this. We still have the traditional spam filter. We’ve always dealt with that. The interesting part with spam filters is they have edge filtering. If you imagine how the post office works, I put it in the sent items, it goes through the post office and gets delivered to my physical mailbox. The edge filter is looking at that stuff before it hits the physical mailbox. The edge filter is sitting there catching all the stuff that comes in. We looked at it recently and it was something crazy like 80% of inbound emails to our clients were blocked by the edge filter because it was all spam.
On top of the spam filter, we now have anti-phishing technology. That is looking at stuff and when it catches something, it will actually pull it out of everyone’s mailbox. The other nice part about antiphishing technology is you’ll see certain things, for example, if you get an email from someone’s personal email instead of their work one, there will be a flag that says hey, this might not be malicious but it isn’t the normal email address that is used. Spam tends to be much less harmful. The phishing attacks is where we are seeing a ton of harm, specifically around financial fraud. Phishing tends to be more malicious than spam. Oftentimes with spam, they are trying to sell you something, even though it is a cheap piece of junk, or they are trying to get you to sign up for something. That is why you have to protect both sides of the house.
Trey: All good information. If you feel like your firm could be operating more securely, fill out this form and a member of our team will reach out.