Email slip-ups are the leading cause of data breaches

Have you fallen into the trap of ignoring the most likely source of data breaches? Don’t just focus on attacks from the outside when your biggest threat is actually from inside your organization.

In 2017 the biggest source of data breaches was human error—inadvertently sending an email to the wrong person or adding the wrong attachment. Everyone has done it because it is all too easy to do. Consider how often we rely on the Outlook autofill feature to suggest the email recipient without really checking or clicking Reply All when we only meant to reply to one person.

Suppressing the Outlook autofill feature to minimize the chance of error is not an option. Locking down autofill makes emailing time-consuming and frustrating for users. Plus, it isn’t a foolproof way to eliminate the risk of data breaches since there’s nothing stopping users attaching the wrong file.

More than embarrassing, accidentally sending private client or sensitive business information to the wrong person is considered a data breach under new government regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the Notifiable Data Breach (NDB) scheme in Australia. How much are you willing to pay for a missent email?

Four ways to a certain email data breach

Email recipient checking software prevents data breaches

Sending an email to the wrong person is more than embarrassing – it tells employees and clients that you aren’t properly managing and protecting their information. Checking and verifying an email address before the message is sent can reduce the likelihood of data breaches and embarrassing email blunders.

Email recipient technology works only when needed so you can continue to work uninterrupted. When the user clicks Send, it assesses the list of recipients for risk: i.e., external; public (Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! etc); or blacklisted domain names. The sender must either confirm the names as the intended recipients or take preventative action.

Email recipient checking will protect your business from experiencing a data breach.