Email Security – First City Internet, LLC

According to the Verizon 2019 DBIR, 94% of security incidents that involved malware occurred via malicious emails. So, 9 out of 10 malware attacks were conducted using email. Phishing attempts have increased 5-fold in just 3 years and Business Email Compromise is the biggest contributor to financial loss for businesses. Email is the main vector for ransomware distribution and almost 80% of all email traffic worldwide is spam.

Even with these overwhelming statistics, many businesses fail to properly implement all the tools at their disposal to protect their email. Protecting email is more than just scanning for spam and viruses. That approach worked ten years ago but doesn’t work in today’s cyberthreat landscape. What’s needed is a comprehensive approach that not only scans for spam and malicious content but also implements other tools including DKIM validation, DNSSEC, proper SPF implementation, DMARC, MTA-STS requirements and TLS reporting. These tools implemented together provide the best approach to ensuring your emails are delivered to the intended recipients, protects your domains reputation, ensures delivery through TSL encrypted channels and dramatically reduces the number of spam messages received.

Properly implementing these controls is technically challenging and requires the right expertise. First City Internet’s Email Security Service handles all the details for your business. Our Email Security Service provides your business with these benefits:

Protection against cyber threats: Email is a common vector for cyber-attacks such as business email compromise, phishing, malware, and ransomware. Email security helps protect you from these threats by blocking suspicious emails or attachments and detecting and alerting you to potential attacks.

Privacy and confidentiality: Email security helps ensure that your messages and attachments are only accessible by authorized recipients. Encryption technology can be used to protect the content of your emails from being intercepted and read by unauthorized parties.

Compliance: Depending on your industry or location, you may be subject to regulations that require you to take certain security measures to protect sensitive information, such as personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), or financial information. Email security can help you comply with these regulations and avoid potential penalties or legal consequences.

Reputation and trust: A compromised email account can lead to unauthorized access to your contacts, potentially damaging your reputation and trust with your clients, colleagues, and partners. Email security can help prevent this from happening by detecting and blocking unauthorized access attempts.

Our Email Security Service handles everything for you and ensures delivery to your email provider of choice. This service includes:

SPAM and virus filtering
Daily Held Email reports w/ self-service message recovery
Quarantine management access
DKIM signing for all relayed messages
TLS receipt and delivery enforcement options
SPF DNS record optimization
DMARC DNS record optimization
MTA-STS configuration hosting
DMARC aggregate report analysis
TLS reporting
BIMI configuration hosting (Requires certificate w/ additional cost)
Guaranteed Mail Hardener Score of 90% or greater (most domains we host have a score of 100%)
Delivery to email provider of your choice

Service Details

SPAM & Virus Filtering – Each message will be scanned using the virus scanning built into our filtering gateway. We implement a variety of scanning rules to quarantine messages with suspicious attachments and links.

Daily Held Email reports – All valid email addresses filtered by our gateway cluster can be configured to receive a daily notification listing messages that were held as spam with the option for self-service message recovery, whitelisting, and blacklisting.

DKIM signing – All relayed messages will be DKIM signed using a common DKIM key that is advertised in your domain’s DNS. This ensures that upstream mail servers will be able to check the integrity of incoming messages relayed though our filtering gateway.

TLS enforcement – We can configure our relay servers to enforce TLS for all messages relayed to your mail servers. Our reporting interface will also verify that incoming messages to our relay server are delivered via TLS.

DNS Record Optimization – Our team will work with your domain admin to ensure that all necessary records required for optimal email delivery are properly configured in your DNS for your domain. These include DKIM, DMARC, SPF, MTA-STS and DANE records.

MTA-STS Configuration Hosting – Enforcing TLS for inbound messages requires the hosting of an MTA-STS configuration file on a publicly accessible web server. We handle all this for you by hosting and testing the configuration.

Guaranteed Mailhardener Score of 90% or Greater – Mailhardener service is provided for each domain that we filter. This service gives you real time data on the configuration status of your domain related to optimal email delivery. The service also handles reporting functions for DMARC aggregate reports and TLS reporting.

BIMI Asset Hosting – Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) asset hosting is included with service for each domain. Note that each domain implementing BIMI must have a certificate with a Verified Mark extension from a trusted certificate authority. There is an added cost for these certificates issued by a third party.

Relay to Any Mail Server – We will configure our filtering gateway to relay messages to the mail server of your choice – Gmail, Exchange Online, SmarterMail, etc.