Threats to your organization

Learn about various threats that could affect an organization.

Type of threat	Description
Reputation of a company	An unguarded or ill-informed remark by an employee might cause legal problems, unless it is covered by a disclaimer.
Large email messages	Large email messages or messages that contain numerous attachments can slow down the performance of email servers.
Mass-mailer viruses	Although they can be cleaned like any other virus, they can spread rapidly and quickly degrade the performance of your network.
Email messages from unwanted sources	Disgruntled ex-employees and unscrupulous individuals who know the email addresses of your employees can cause distress and distraction by sending unwanted emails.
Non-business use of email	If most employees use recipient email addresses not within their organization, such emails are likely to be for personal or non-business use.
Loss of company-confidential information	Employees might disclose confidential information related to unreleased products, customers or partners.
Offensive language	Offensive words or phrases can appear in email messages and attachments. Besides causing offense, they can provoke legal action too.
Transfer of entertainment files	Large video or audio files intended for entertainment might reduce your network performance.
Inefficient file types	Some files use large amounts of memory and can be slow to transfer, but alternatives are often available. For example, GIF and JPEG files are much smaller than their equivalent BMP files.
Transfer of large files	Transferring large files can reduce your network performance.
Denial-of-service attack	A deliberate surge of large files can seriously affect the performance of your network, making it unusable to its legitimate users. While scanning large size compressed files, TSME considers three parameters for DOS attack: Scanning time for compressed files exceeds the threshold. The nested levels of compressed files are identified. For example, a compressed .zip file contains another compressed files inside, and continues expanding with more compressed files. The expandable size limit of archived files exceeds the threshold.
Pornographic text	Vulgar language or terms must not be used in emails.
Viruses and other potentially unwanted software	Viruses and other potentially unwanted software can quickly make computers and data unusable.
Corrupt or encrypted content	This type of content cannot be scanned. Appropriate policies must be specified to handle it.