The team at BlackCloak wanted to help keep you and your family safe & secure when thinking about personal email choices. Some clients have registered (or have expressed an interest in registering) their last name for their email domain (e.g. @lastname.com, @lastname.org, etc).
There are pros and cons between having a specific domain name as your email versus a normal “Gmail” or “Yahoo” mail address. Most of these differences depend on the ability to secure the: (1) email server, (2) the types of security protocols used to assess the email account, and (3) the embedded security features (e.g. phishing protection, etc.).
With this in mind, BlackCloak is providing the following cybersecurity guidance for your consideration:
Family domains are typically registered through third party providers similar to typical websites. As a hypothetical, Don Taylor wants to register a family domain, so he contacts a domain registration company (e.g., Google or GoDaddy) to register www.taylorfamily.com. These domain registration companies typically do not provide enhanced measures to authenticate emails from phishing emails, thus a user's inbox is prone to junk mail and potentially malicious emails.
Email addresses are easily guessed (in our hypothetical, Don Taylor likely has the email of don@taylorfamily.com), making it is easy to target members of the family via email.
Unlike major email providers like Google, Yahoo, Outlook, etc., third-party companies are less likely to have robust anti-phishing technologies or multi-factor authentication, which are used to further enhance the security of your email accounts. It is highly suggested that all accounts use multi-factor authentication to supplement your user name/password, since those can be compromised.
Family domains hosted in data centers or the “IT Guy's” place of business require security patches and updates on a regular basis. If these updates are not applied, hackers can take action on open vulnerabilities and potentially compromise email accounts. On the other hand, major email providers like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Office 365 continuously patch their email platforms so you can ensure your email accounts are being managed correctly.
What Does BlackCloak Recommend
If you are interested in using a family domain as your email, we would recommend registering the domain and then using a major email service such as Microsoft Office 365 or Google Business Suite GMail to provide email security. This can be accomplished by first registering the domain, then configuring O365/Gmail to be the email client for that custom domain. For Don in our example above, if he follows this recommendation, he can register the domain he wants, he can set up a more difficult guessed email name, use built-in multi-factor authentication, and have patching completed by Microsoft or Google.
As always, the BLACKCLOAK Team is here to help. If you have any questions, email us at ask@blackcloak.io.
Thanks!
The BLACKCLOAK Team
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