2022-04-20

S/MIME: confidentiality and secure email

Corporate email is the target of increasingly bold and sophisticated cyber attacks. Most of them are phishing emails, which are emails pretending to be from known or trusted senders – banks, courier companies or service providers, prompting you to enter fake phishing sites. However, cyber threats are also the result of human errors. How to prevent them? Use the E-Mail ID S/MIME certificate Explore the details.

A secure email is a secure company

Failure to protect the flow of email from sender to recipient makes it the Achilles heel of many organizations and exposes companies to the loss of much valuable and classified information.

In addition to cyber attacks, a common cause of corporate email leaks are human errors, a simple mistake or oversight:

• sending a message to the wrong addressee,
• sending messages from corporate email to private email,
• using corporate email on private devices,
• insufficiently strong passwords.

Such actions increase the risk of data interception by third parties or uncontrolled data leakage. Unfortunately, the human factor cannot be eliminated even with the most secure systems.

However, this risk can certainly be minimized. For example, using E-mail ID S/MIME which is an Internet protocol that allows encrypting and signing messages. It has been used for years by hundreds of companies around the world who care about email security.

How does S/MIME protect?

The Certum S/MIME certificate confirms the user’s identity, authenticates their email address and company data, and protects message flow from third-party access.

S/MIME certificates ensure:

• Signing messages
  S/MIME is a digital signature of an employee that is automatically added to every message sent. This makes it easy for recipients to verify its origin and sender. They can check it before they read it and feel safe because the certificate confirms that they can fully trust it. Using an independent certificate with data verified by a Trusted Third Party builds reputation and trust in the company.
• Protection against modification
  Using the E-Mail ID S/MIME is a guarantee of email integrity. Any change to the message content will invalidate the certificate. The email program will inform the user that the message or attachment has been modified. In this way, they will not open it and thus avoid the associated risks.
• Message encryption
  Encryption ensures complete confidentiality. The content will only be decrypted and read by the sender and recipient if they have matching certificates. Employees of the company can access email content only on a certified device. They will not be able to read encrypted mail outside the workplace and outside authorized devices.

Automate your email protection!

The E-Mail ID S/MIME certificate can be part of a security policy to minimize the risk of corporate email leakage. However, the process of issuing, business verification, and installation of certificates requires a lot of action from the user.

In the case of dozens or hundreds of employees, this is already a serious and time-consuming organizational challenge. That is why Certum has created an application that completely automates the process of issuing E-mail ID certificates to multiple people in a company while simplifying employee identity verification.

With just one click, you can issue any number of certificates that are immediately ready for distribution and installation.

Choose S/MIME encryption

If you are interested in securing your company’s email quickly and implementing E-Mail ID certificates, please contact us at infolinia@certum.pl

Anna Sikorska, Product Manager at the Trust Services Division at Asseco Data Systems