Hackers use email to find potential victims and steal personal information. This can be names, addresses, and login credentials. Once a potential victim is found, cybercriminals do not hesitate to take money from accounts, extort money, or sell personal data to outside users. Protection against such actions can only be systematic and professional. Learn more about how email with encryption works and how encryption helps protect your business in the detailed Reply expert guide.
How cybercriminals work and what they steal
Data obtained from email correspondence, which on the surface may be perfectly safe, can be used to obtain information used in social engineering. This data is not so much used for a specific hack or to open an account, but to find other loopholes for accessing financial and personal data. These can include identity theft, an attempt to take control of a particular data set to blackmail a person or create an extortion scheme. These serious crimes are committed by masters of cybercrime. Their main goal is to obtain business data. They rarely target an individual’s correspondence because there is no profit in doing so. That is why companies and organizations should worry about data protection in all available and optimal ways.
PGP, S/MIME, TLS protocols
A wide variety of encryption systems boils down to three major protocols that have long been the standards for quality end-to-end and “transport” security:
- PGP;
- S/MIME;
- TLS.
The PGP encryption protocol dates to 1991. It was one of the first solutions available to many users to effectively protect against cybercrime. Despite its venerable age, PGP is still widely used today to protect private and commercial accounts.
S/MIME is another encryption standard. This standard is used in most email services. S/MIME is similar in encryption algorithms to PGP protocol. The important difference is that you must get the keys for decryption only from a certificate authority.
TLS is an old and proven protocol for keeping data secure while transmitting it and transporting it to recipients from senders. TLS creates a secure encrypted transmission corridor for email.
Another type of “transport” encryption is STARTTLS. STARTTLS automates the data disclosure request system and so neither the sender nor the receiver needs to make special security settings.
