Did You Know: Spam Filtering & Virus Protection Go Hand-in-Hand
Monday, March 2nd, 2020You may already be aware that spam filtering can save you from having to deal with countless emails, but did you know that it can also help you with virus protection?
Spam can be far worse than annoying promotional emails you never asked for. It’s also one of the main paths of entry that hackers use to launch cyberattacks.
Hackers are constantly looking for ways to get to you. Often, it’s when you are browsing, but your email inbox provides another great opportunity that they can’t pass up.
So what do they do? Hackers send thousands or millions of messages out to unsuspecting email users, in the hopes that they make it in front of the users’ eyes. When someone opens one of these emails, they may be met with a phishing attack that attempts to manipulate them into handing over their password or other sensitive details.
Alternatively, the message may include an attachment or a link to malware, alongside a crafty trick that makes the user execute it on their computer.
Thankfully, spam filtering can help to put a stop to these and other attacks.
THE BENEFITS SPAM FILTERING
Spam filtering doesn’t just save you from having to deal with a constant flow of irritating messages. It also helps to stop you from ever seeing these attacks. Since a good spam filter will block many of these phishing attempts and malware-laden emails, it makes it impossible for you to fall for them.
You can’t be tricked by something that never makes it into your inbox.
Spam manWHY YOU NEED A GOOD SPAM FILTER FOR VIRUS PROTECTION
You probably already have a spam filter. Most emails have them these days. However, not all spam filters are equal.
A poorly tuned spam filter may struggle to detect spam and let in too many malicious messages. Alternatively, it may find too many false positives, and filter away important emails from your inbox. If you’re really unlucky, you may experience both sides frequently.
A well-tuned spam filter will allow in your critical emails, while keeping out most of the spam, helping to provide virus protection.
Spam filtering machine
BEEN SPAMMING YOURSELF LATELY? YOU NEED A BETTER-TUNED SPAM FILTER
A properly set up spam filter can even prevent attackers from making it seem like you are spamming yourself. This may seem confusing, but in general, email systems aren’t the best at validating the sender of an email. In certain circumstances, hackers can take advantage of this and use it to bypass your spam filter.
They can get through by making the email appear as though it’s coming from your own address. Let’s say your address is recipient@email.com. You may suddenly find emails from recipient@email.com appearing in your inbox. Emails that you know you didn’t send.
These are really just spam messages. Hackers take advantage of this quirk of the email system, and use it to try to get their messages through to your inbox, so that they can then launch phishing attacks, try to make you download malware, or set up other attacks.
Thankfully, good email filtering software can help to reduce these threats. LuxSci’s email filtering is a great option, and you can minimize the attacks by following the instructions at the bottom of our article about spam emails from “yourself”.
THE BEST SOLUTIONS FOR SPAM FILTERING & VIRUS PROTECTION
LuxSci offers HIPAA-compliant email filtering that is designed with both your security and convenience in mind. There are several different packages that give your organization the options it needs to configure its filtering appropriately for its unique situation. This makes our spam filtering an excellent choice for virus protection while still being easy to use.
Would you like to be able to schedule an auto-response to be sent out not only based on criteria such as recipient email address, but also based on what day of the week and the time? Perhaps you would like a message to fire off only when you are “off shift”. Or, perhaps certain types of messages should be forwarded to a colleague when you are “off shift”.
