Prevent Your Email From Being Pushed Aside or Blocked

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With the ever-present nuisance of spam and threats of cyber attacks, email services continue to add features and protections. Some of these will prevent your email from being delivered, and others will prevent your message from being seen. 

Here are 3 actions you need to take so your messages arrive and are seen.

1 Ensure Your Emails Validate Properly

Yahoo, Google, and other email services now require validation for emails. Initially targeting volume marketers, the validation checks can prevent your emails from reaching their destination. To ensure your emails reach your recipients, you must have DomainKey Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) protocols in place.

Our eBook, Improve Your Email and Deliverability and Security in Five Steps, provides five steps you can take to ensure that your business and marketing emails reach your intended recipients. These steps also help protect you from costly and damaging email identity and business email compromise cyber attacks.

2 Use a Marketing Email Service

Google, Microsoft, and other email services limit the number of emails you can send individually and as an organization. Additionally, these email services lack the controls required by the CAN-SPAM Act and other regulations. 

Marketing email services include the necessary controls, including address publishing, unsubscribe links, and email preferences. They also provide tools for managing contacts, lists, and content.

Using a marketing email service enables you to send bulk emails without being flagged as a spammer. You can protect and maintain your email reputation by using the services to manage your email marketing and response campaigns.

3 Include AI Trigger Words In Your Content

Microsoft Outlook includes a Focus Inbox, while Google Workspace offers Priority Inbox. With iOS 18, Apple will auto-filter email into four segmented inboxes: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions.

With artificial intelligence (AI), the content of your email determines whether it lands in the primary inbox that people check most, or a secondary folder that may go unnoticed. Messages will be prioritized when they include phrases with:

  • Contextual Relevance: Phrases that indicate important actionable content
  • User Behavior: Messages that are typically opened and acted upon more frequently
  • NLP Recognition: Phrases commonly used in critical communications, as they signal priority
  • Transactional Nature: Content commonly used in transactional messages

In addition to identifying these emails for the focus, priority, or primary inbox views, the AI engines will prioritize messages to ensure recipients see them first.

AI trigger words and phrases should be included but need not be the focus of your message: Sample AI trigger words and phrases include:

Registration Confirmed Preview Meeting Invite
Exclusive Invitation Important Update X Day Left
New Feature Subscription Details Action Required
Invitation Enclosed Event Registration Priority Access
Add to Calendar Event Details

Using AI trigger words will improve the visibility of your emails. Expect that preferred phrases will evolve and change over time.

Your Next Steps

Our Cloud Advisors are ready to help you review your email service configuration. Contact us or schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors to learn more.

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America. Starting his first business at age 12, Allen is a serial entrepreneur. He has launched strategic IT consulting, software, and service companies. An advocate for small and midsize businesses, Allen served on the board of the former Smaller Business Association of New England, local economic development committees, and industry advisory boards.

3 IT Trends We See Now

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Working with hundreds of small and midsize businesses, we often see trends in IT interests, plans, and initiatives. Given all the hype, we expected to see Generative AI as a big trend this fall. While our clients are interested in it and beginning to use it, Generative AI is not among the top three trends this fall.

Here are the 3 trends we see now.

3 Incremental Cybersecurity

With a never-ending string of cyber attacks, new regulations, and expanded expectations from customers, insurers, and others, your peers are reassessing their cybersecurity measures and making adjustments. 

Like your business, most small businesses have some cybersecurity measures in place. Adding incremental services is a fiscally smart way to increase prevention, fill gaps in protection, and ensure a more effective response. 

Universal multi-factor authentication (MFA), penetration testing, security awareness training, and improved recovery and continuity solutions are among the services your peers are adding.

2 Virtual Desktops

Remote and hybrid work are the norm. So is bring-your-own-device, or BYOD. The challenge is ensuring your team has a consistent user experience that is productive and secure.

Virtual Desktop, sometimes referred to as remote desktop solutions, provides a cloud-resident environment that is secure and effective. With a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), such as Azure Windows Desktop, your team accesses a secure work environment from any device with Internet access. Apps run and data remains in the cloud – only screen, keyboard, and mouse traffic touch the local device.

By removing the end user device from the security envelope, you do not need to put security software, or company data, on employees’ personal devices. You reduce the scope of your management (and the cost) while having more control over your environment.

1 Managed Cloud Services

Your IT and cloud services are more sophisticated and capable. Keeping current, ensuring the environment is secure, and helping your team use your IT services most effectively takes time. Instead of letting things slide, your fellow small business owners and leaders are moving towards Managed Cloud Services.

Managed Cloud Services, like more traditional managed IT services, put monitoring, management, administration, and support into the hands of experts. You get an integrated bundle of security, services, and support that matches your needs and your budget.

While Managed Cloud Services often comes with some increased costs, the enhanced value gained outweighs the cost.

Your Next Steps

Our Cloud Advisors are ready to help you assess if and how Virtual Desktops and Managed Cloud Services may benefit your team and business.

To assess and adjust your cybersecurity, check out these resources:

Our eBook, Cyber Security Requirements for Cyber Insurance, defines basic, preferred, and best practice cybersecurity for small businesses. 

We also offer multiple assessments to help you understand and benchmark your current cybersecurity, including:

These assessments are free with a Referral Code. 

Contact us or schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors to learn more and obtain your Referral Code. 

About the Author

Bill Seybolt bio pictureBill is a Senior Cloud Advisor responsible for helping small and midsize organizations with cloud forward solutions that meet their business needs, priorities, and budgets. Bill works with executives, leaders, and team members to understand workflows, identify strategic goals and tactical requirements, and design solutions and implementation phases. Having helped over 200 organizations successfully adopt cloud solutions, his expertise and working style ensure a comfortable experience effective change management.

ALERT: Threatening Emails are Spiking

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ALERT

In the last 72 hours, our clients have reported an alarming increase in threatening emails. These emails contain enough personal information to legitimately trigger worry, fear, and in some cases, panic. 

This post covers three types of threatening messages and how to respond.

The Attacks

This type of attack is known as a “Exposure Threat” or “Fear of Exposure” attack. Attackers threaten to release embarrassing or sensitive information about you or your business. They may share bits of information or make claims that imply or confirm that they really do have some information. 

Here are three common forms of the threat:

1 “We Know Where You Live”

The email arrives in your inbox from what looks like a “legitimate” Gmail, Yahoo!, or other email service. The subject line contains your name or that of a family member. The message includes your full address and a valid phone number. In some cases, this threat may also include a picture of your home or office. 

Most often, this type of email does not include any explicit threat or demand.

The implication “we know where you live” is intended to instill fear. The goal is to make you more likely to respond and cooperate with future threats. 

2“We Know What You Did”

This form of attack claims to have documents, images, or video of you doing something embarrassing or illegal. The attacker will claim to have access to your email account, or all of your contacts, and will threaten to share the information if you fail to pay a ransom.

This is an explicit form of extortion.

The attackers are betting that the fear of exposure will cause you to pay the demand and prevent you from reporting the attack.

3“We Have Your Information”

This form of attack threatens to disclose sensitive information about you, your business, or your customers. The threat is the damage a data breach causes. This can include serious and costly legal, regulatory, or contractual issues. The attackers may share a sample that “proves” they have the information on hand.

This attack typically includes a specific threat and an extortion demand.

The preview information shared by the attackers may be from sensitive files, but it may also be available from other sources. This form of attack warrants some investigation.

How to Respond: Do NOT Panic!

First and foremost, do NOT panic. The success of these attacks is dependent upon your fear and your reaction. If you receive an email that is like one of these cases or similar, how you respond can make a difference.

No Specific Threat

  • If the email does not contain a specific threat or demand, your best response is to mark and report the email as spam. Doing so should direct future emails directly to your spam or junk folder.
  • You can take the extra step of reporting the message as abuse to the email server. Here are links to report email abuse for Gmail, Sky/Yahoo!, and Xfinity/Comcast.

With a Specific Threat

  • If the email contains a specific threat, you can and should report the message as spam/junk. We recommend your report this to your IT service provider. Your IT team should investigate the possible risks and take appropriate preventative and responsive measures.
  • Extortion is a crime. While many local law enforcement departments do not have the expertise to investigate cyber crimes, most state police organizations have cyber crime units. You can also report the attack directly to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The IC3 will route your report to the FBI and other relevant agencies. Depending on the nature of the attack, the response may range from acknowledgement of the report to a full criminal investigation.
  • If the email includes a threat to show up at your home or business if you do not respond or comply. we strongly recommend reporting the threat to law enforcement.

Possible Data Breach

  • If the threat indicates that the attacker has, or can, access sensitive data, promptly take additional steps to protect yourself and your business.
  • If the attack references personal information, placing locks on your credit reports is always a good step. If the threat mentions (or indicates) a source, such as your bank or investment accounts, report the incident directly to that institution or business. Discuss protections they can put in place on your behalf.
  • If the attack references information from your business, promptly investigate the possible breach. This may involve scanning systems for malware and advanced threats, analyzing logs for unauthorized access, and verifying compliance with security measures. The level of your investigation should match the level of risk. Your IT service provider can help you assess the situation and determine the best course of action.

Your Next Steps

You can protect yourself and your business from these attacks, and other cyber attacks before they happen. Our Security CPR model provides a guide.

  • Communicate and Educate: Learn about, and help your team understand, the risks, nature, and impact of cyber attacks. Communicate the need for vigilance and how their behaviors can enable or prevent a successful attack.
  • Protect and Prevent: Put cybersecurity policies, procedures, systems, and services in place commensurate with your business’s risks, needs, priorities, and budget. This includes advanced threat protection for email and strong settings for your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols in your DNS record. 
  • Respond and Recover: Ensure that you have systems, processes, and services in place to respond and recover should an attack be successful. Beyond restoring data and systems, have resources available to address the legal, regulatory, and customer service issues that often arise. Ideally, have solutions in place that allow you to keep your business running while you respond and recover.

For help assessing your current cybersecurity protections, please send an email or schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors to discuss our cybersecurity assessments and solutions.

About the Author

Chris CaldwellChristopher Caldwell is the COO and a co-founder of Cumulus Global.  Chris is a successful Information Services executive with 40 years experience in information services operations, application development, management, and leadership. His expertise includes corporate information technology and service management; program and project management; strategic and project-specific business requirements analysis; system requirements analysis and specification; system, application, and database design; software engineering and development, data center management, network and systems administration, network and system security, and end-user technical support.

5 Cybersecurity Standards for Small and Midsize Businesses

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5 Cybersecurity StandardsAs small and midsize business leaders, we understand the need to comply with regulatory and industry requirements. We also want and need our IT services to support our business priorities and fit within our budget. So how much cybersecurity is enough? Our cyber insurance partner, Datastream, analyzed policies and coverages for nearly 8 million businesses across dozens of industries globally. The most common cyber attacks exploit weak credentials, human behavior, and out-of-date software to gain access to your systems and data. From there, they can not only launch ransomware attacks, they can initiate business email compromise and other costly and damaging attacks. The result: Datastream identified a bare minimum set of 5 cybersecurity standards

The 5 Minimum Cybersecurity Standards

To address the most common and costly forms of cyber attacks, implement these 5 cybersecurity standards.

1 Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

MFA requires a secondary physical authentication when logging in. Whether by text, authenticator app, one-time passwords, or magic links, MFA can prevent attackers from using compromised credentials. According to studies by Microsoft, more than 90% of cyber attacks can be blocked if MFA is in place.

While the minimum standard is coverage for email access and remote network connections, we recommend using MFA for access to any and all critical systems, applications, and data.

2 Encryption

Do you encrypt all sensitive information at rest, including backups?

Most of our systems and applications encrypt data in transit (in motion). Encrypting data at rest, regardless of where it resides, prevents your data from being easily accessed and used in a cyber attack. Encryption should be in place on workstations and personal computers, not just on servers and in cloud-based services.

Just as important, backups should be encrypted. Unencrypted backups provide cyber attackers with easy access to data. Backups should also be stored off-site or in the cloud using immutable storage. This strategy prevents corruption of backup sets in the event of a ransomware attack. 

3 Data Recovery

In the last 6 months, has your company tested its ability to recover all business-critical data and systems within 10 days or less, from offline or cloud backups that are no more than a week old? 

Backing up data and systems is easy. Recovery is hard. Knowing that you can reliably restore your data and systems demonstrates your level of protection and how well you have reduced risks. Documenting this will impact your cyber insurance premiums.

While the 10-day recovery window is a minimum expectation, it may not be sufficient for your business. We recommend analyzing your business needs and setting goals to return to operations in a way that minimizes the impact of any disruption.

4 Automated Hardening Policies

Do you implement automated hardening policies?

Hardening systems is the process of limiting the attack surface of your systems, applications, and data. Hardening tactics include:

  • Removing unused applications and accounts
  • Disabling unnecessary services, ports, protocols, and features
  • Limiting administrative permissions and access
  • Logging appropriate activities, errors, and warnings

The process of configuring and managing hardened systems is easiest to manage with a remote monitoring and management (RMM) system in place.

5 Patches and Updates

Do you apply critical patches and updates to key IT systems and applications within two months?

Updates and patches to operating systems are familiar and comfortable. We regularly receive and apply updates to our smartphones, laptops, and desktops, most often as part of a default, automated process. We may not, however, be as diligent with our business systems and applications.

Updates and patches to databases, applications, and other software often require validation and may require changes to settings and integrations. Regularly reviewing updates and patches, and having a process in place to verify and apply updates, ensures that your systems have current security fixes and features.

Your Next Steps

Having these five cybersecurity standards in place represents a no-nonsense minimum that protects your business and can improve your cybersecurity coverage and premiums.

Our eBook, Cyber Security Requirements for Cyber Insurance, dives deeper to define basic, preferred, and best practices. You can, and should, scale your cybersecurity to meet your business’s specific risks, priorities, and budget.

We offer multiple assessments to help you understand and benchmark your current cybersecurity.

  • Rapid Security Assessment
  • Cyber Insurance Risk Assessment 

These assessments are free with a Referral Code. Contact us or schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors to learn more and obtain your code.

Help us keep the ideas flowing. If you have any blog posts that are leadership thoughts you want to share, please let us know.

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America. Starting his first business at age 12, Allen is a serial entrepreneur. He has launched strategic IT consulting, software, and service companies. An advocate for small and midsize businesses, Allen served on the board of the former Smaller Business Association of New England, local economic development committees, and industry advisory boards.