The most damaging viruses, which can bring serious impairment to your email system and corporate network in minutes, are sent out worldwide through email in only a matter of a few hours.
Email security can be attacked at least four different ways by means of electronic mail: active content attacks, shell script attacks, buffer overflow attacks, and Trojan horse attacks.
Active content attacks take advantage of different active HTML and scripting features and bugs. The assaults concentrate on those individuals who use a web browser or HTML-enabled email client to read their email.
Shell script attacks occurs when a portion of a Unix shell script is built-in the message headers with the intent that a wrongly configured Unix mail client will carry out the commands.
Buffer overflow attacks take place when an assailant sends information that is too big to fit into a fixed-size memory buffer in the email client. The assailant’s goal is that the section that does not fit will overwrite critical information instead of being eliminated and discarded.
Trojan horse attacks occur when a program that causes damage is mailed to an email recipient as a file attachment and is labeled as something innocent such as a greeting card. The purpose is to persuade the receiver to open the damaging message attachment.
With all these various attacks it is important to make sure that email is secure.
Today there are various tools available to prevent attacks on your computer’s security by means of email messages.
These tools can block access to particular file types that could spread damaging codes.
In addition, those tools designed for corporate mail systems can reduce the downtime connected with viruses, spam, and numerous other threats, ultimately reducing the burden on technical staff.
Some of the features in these solutions include preventing programs from getting into your address book or sending emails on your behalf, allowing administrators options to customize the email settings to adhere to the standard security needs of the company, corporate email policy enforcement, and blocking email attachments connected with dangerous files.
Some Internet sites allow you to run a test in order to do a vulnerability check on your email system. The site runs a vulnerability check on your email system and then sends the results by email.