
- One email account for all your sensitive financial information. It should never be used for correspondence or personal communications.
- A second email account for all your correspondence. This would be an address used to communicate with family and friends but never has a credit card or merchant associated with it for any Internet or brick and mortar sales.
- A third email account for all online transactions/purchases that is never used for banks or correspondence.
So, what is the trick? How does this apply to business?
The same concepts I mentioned above can apply to your business. Individuals in finance, legal, and human resources can have multiple email addresses delegated for specific sensitive conversations. The email addresses may also be restricted to only internal communications such that they do not have the same risk surface for a phishing attack. The threat of an email posing as a fake wire transfer can be minimized since the address would have to originate within the organization versus being publicly addressable. Many organizations already utilize internal only email addresses, but creating some of the most sensitive communications and individuals just make sense. So why aren’t more organizations doing it? One simple reason is passwords. It is yet another account to manage and another password to potentially remember. This is where a good enterprise password safe can help. It can store these credentials and allow information technology administrators to set and reset them as needed to keep them random and secure. With both concepts working together – multiple email addresses and unique passwords for everything – consumers and businesses can keep identities and accounts secure. In addition, a residual benefit is a reduction in risk surface for phishing attacks since only certain emails should contain only specific content. It is not hard to teach individuals, or even yourself, to know the difference. So, if you are looking for an enterprise password manager that could help, PowerBroker Password Safe can help keep the problems related to identity theft down to a minimum.
Morey J. Haber, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at BeyondTrust
Morey J. Haber is Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at BeyondTrust. He has more than 25 years of IT industry experience and has authored four Apress books: Privileged Attack Vectors (2 Editions), Asset Attack Vectors, and Identity Attack Vectors. In 2018, Bomgar acquired BeyondTrust and retained the BeyondTrust name. He originally joined BeyondTrust in 2012 as a part of the eEye Digital Security acquisition. Morey currently oversees BeyondTrust strategy for privileged access management and remote access solutions. In 2004, he joined eEye as Director of Security Engineering and was responsible for strategic business discussions and vulnerability management architectures in Fortune 500 clients. Prior to eEye, he was Development Manager for Computer Associates, Inc. (CA), responsible for new product beta cycles and named customer accounts. He began his career as Reliability and Maintainability Engineer for a government contractor building flight and training simulators. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.