The art of securing shared mailboxes

29 Nov ‘22

Shared mailboxes are used extensively by both large and small organizations. Think of info@, support@, sales@ etcetera. These enable employees to read and answer emails on behalf of an entire department.

The digital signing of email with an S/MIME certificate, as recommended by the Dutch Forum Standardisation, is considered to be one of the best methods to protect against Business Email Compromise (BEC). Whereas digital signing and full end-to-end encryption based on S/MIME are increasingly embraced for personal email addresses, the digital signing of shared mailboxes often lags behind, which means that businesses and organizations remain vulnerable to BEC in these shared mailboxes.

This is not without reason, as the mass deployment of S/MIME for shared mailboxes is a major challenge for the IT department. It is possible, but the supporting documentation from Microsoft and Google or from Mobile Device Management (MDM) providers is very limited.

How do you ensure that, for 10 shared mailboxes, you are able to install and configure a publicly trusted S/MIME certificate with private key for, for example, 30 employees? And how do you go about renewing or withdrawing an S/MIME certificate for shared mailboxes?

KeyTalk has many years of experience with these challenges, and has integrated the acquired knowledge in its KeyTalk CKMS (Certificate and Key Management System) that forms the heart of our ‘Secure Email Service‘. With the help of this service you are able to easily and automatically distribute both a personal email S/MIME certificate and S/MIME certificates for shared mailboxes to all users of these shared mailboxes.

Do you recognize this challenge within your organization? Get in touch with us today.

The KeyTalk Team