How Much is Email Used?

    For this Tuesday’s Tech Tip, I’m going to start a series that’s going to run for ten weeks. We’re going to talk about email security specifically. I’ve had a large number of people requesting, and asking how to secure their email. Because quite frankly, it is like the gateway drug, if you will, for cybercriminals to get into your account. We’re going to start with this first episode. We’re going to talk about in general, just how much email is in use. Stay tuned.

    To kick off our series on email security I just want to give you some general knowledge about the use of email. I’m going to read here some notes I have from a company called Templafy, a content enablement platform. They did a study and worldwide there is an average of about 294,000,000,000 emails that are sent every day. And about 4 billion email users are sending those. The average daily email per person is about 121 emails that you receive a day. Some people are going to receive a lot more and some are going to receive a lot less. That’s going to depend on a lot of things. Basically what industry you’re in, as well as how good a spam filter you have, along with a lot of other factors.

    That means there are 120 opportunities for not only you but every employee that you have to click on something in an email that could set up a series of events, which is what we are going to talk about. They call it the attack platform that I spoke about earlier. Which could be stealing data from you, exfiltrating, or figuring out how to use your influence or contacts to continue the bad actions of these bad actors by spreading from your sphere of influence. As well as even just by clicking and putting a persistent threat on your machine.

    I’m calling email really kind of like using the drug way, marijuana is the gateway drug. Again, it has nothing to do with that, but everyone can relate to that being a gateway drug into other drugs. Well, email is the gateway oftentimes into business networks because the average person is receiving 121 emails a day. Then you multiply that times all the people that you have. So what you have is a great opportunity for bad actors to infiltrate your network.

    That’s kind of just the start of this. I’m going to break it down even further in the subsequent series that we’re going to be doing, to give you some information about what’s happening and ultimately ways to mitigate these bad actors. Week to week we’re going to go over the series. We’re going to get us to where our email, which is for most small businesses, is our number one risk. If we can lower that risk in that number one category, it’s going to do wonders for the overall risk of the company. So stay tuned if you have questions, I’m always here to answer and help. So I appreciate you and stay safe out there.