Email Is Not Secure Naturally.

Lately in the news we’ve been hearing about Email servers and scandals involved with email. Some people have commented: “So what? Email is secure.” But it’s not, there are steps you must take to make your email secure! We have had clients ask us to email them passwords or other important information, we do not agree with being careless in the handling of very sensitive information. Instead we pick up the phone and give them a call with the information or use another method such as a trip to their office to check in.

Email was not designed with any privacy or security in mind. Email was designed back when the internet was a much smaller place for simple store and forward messages.

How Can Email Get Intercepted?

There are several places that email must travel through to go from one’s hands to another’s eyes. From the sender’s device across the networks to the receiving email server and onto the recipient’s device.

So you can see there are several places where your emails can get intercepted, many computers do not have a login screen or a lock screen code, same with many phones and tablets. If you leave your tablet at the local coffee shop with no lock code, you’ve just compromised all of the emails you’ve sent and received. Malware also likes to scan through emails stored on computers too and send itself onto recipients in your address book.

The networks where your unencrypted emails pass through to send and receive messages around the world are a series of routers and switches, all of these connections are owned by different people and have varying security protocols.

And as we’ve heard lots about email severs on the news lately, email servers are where your email are physically stored to be read and downloaded to your email browser. Email servers are also insecure unless the overhead has been put in to make them secure through encryption. If a message was originally sent unencrypted across unencrypted networks, it’s going to come onto the server unencrypted. It’s important to keep your email secure.

What Are My Options to Keep My Email Secure?

Encrypted Email

Use encrypted email, a process of scrambling the messages with complex mathematical algorithms that can only be solved to be read using a password or other credentials on the receiving end.  This can prove to be daunting depending on the number of people you want to email, all of them must have the proper credentials to read your emails. Although email headers are not encrypted, so if you’re trying to hide who you are sending an email to that information is wide open, even the NSA has touted scanning email headers for information during digital pat downs.

Mix It Up

You could send an email to a client letting them know that you’re texting them a password for a particular purpose. Then send the text with no additional references for what it’s for.

Use a Service

LastPass is still one of the most secure ways to create and store passwords. You can share passwords in LastPass with other LastPass users.

File Services

Services like DropBox are also useful and fairly secure. Since Dropbox encrypts everything you upload and download over a secure HTTPS connection, your file transfer should be secure from start to finish. Although mobile DropBox is not secure. You could also create and send an encrypted ZIP file.

Staying Secure

It’s important to continue downloading and applying updates for the services you run to stay secure. For a long time iMessage was thought to be secure, vulnerabilities were found and Apple had to release security patches to plug those holes. If you’re ever in doubt about a security patch, visit the provider’s website directly and check out their support area for recent updates.