E-mail attachments: useful or useless?

E-mail attachments: useful or useless?

Since its creation, e-mail has established itself as a fast and simple means of communication that allows you to quickly send not only pure text but also small files, such as text documents or images. Even if several cloud services are now available for data exchange, e-mail is still often the first choice when it comes to sending fast files such as text documents or images to one or more recipients. What may seem useful in private life, however, could pose problems in e-mail marketing or in communicating with customers by e-mail, especially with e-mail transactions that often contain sensitive data and that customers urgently expect. Related challenges and possible consequences are explained below:



Attachments as an entry point for malware


Attachments often serve as a gateway for malware. If a cyber criminal is phishing, he or she will want to give the impression that the messages come from a trustworthy source. Depending on the type of phishing, the sender may pose as a supervisor, financial service provider or an insurance company. This increases the likelihood and danger that these attachments will be opened. Typically, these attachments are manipulated in such a way that they exploit security holes in an application – PDF viewer, for example, e-mail client or in the operating system – to infect the recipient’s computer. Once under the criminal’s control, the infected computer can go unnoticed and become part of a network of "bots" (interactive robotic systems) that send spam or participate in DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. In this way, a criminal can also have access to all the data from the e-mail recipient’s computer. Due to these serious risks, e-mail service providers and spam filters check attachments very carefully. As a result, the deliverability of these e-mails may be adv ..

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