Most of us wouldn’t want anyone snooping around our personal or company emails. Yet email security breaches are becoming more common. Consider these recent situations:
- Nearly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee were released by hackers in late July. The hack also included the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which raises money for Democrats in Congress, and personal email accounts of Hillary Clinton’s campaign officials.
- Just a week earlier, attendees at the Republican National Convention were the victims of fake Wi-Fi hotspots which many used to check their email accounts. Fortunately the phony access points were set up by security researchers to prove just how easy it is to obtain user identities and access to password-protected accounts.
- Earlier this year, a teenage hacker claimed responsibility for breaching the personal email accounts of the US Director of National Intelligence. Last year, the same person breached the email account for the Director of the CIA.
As unthinkable as these situations are, they are happening with regularity and hackers are only getting smarter and more organized. A Google search for “corporate email hack” returns numerous instructional links on how to hack email accounts as well as news about nefarious organizations that will hack into corporate accounts for a just few hundred dollars.
Take a moment and imagine what types of emails come across your desk. Trade secrets? Potential deals? Insider squabbles? Now imagine these details being shared with the world, including your customers and competitors. A breach like this could seriously damage an organization.
One of the hard things about protecting emails is the fact that emails don’t just live inside your network. Advancements in mobility have made it so that email can be checked from almost anywhere on nearly any type of device. This makes it extremely hard for your IT team to get on top of email security.
To help our customers overcome this challenge, GTRI recently partnered with Absio, developers of a patented technology that individually encrypts emails and stores them on a proprietary file system. Here’s how it works.
Absio Dispatch is an easy-to-use, multi-platform email application that automatically secures and controls messages and attachments everywhere they exist, with enterprise administration and archiving capabilities. Each message and attachment is individually encrypted in storage and in transit automatically. In addition, Dispatch allows the sender to control whether their recipients can save, print, copy, forward, or reply all to the message, and whether they can save, print or copy attached file content. The sender can also set messages to expire at a given time or recall previously sent messages. (Source: Absio.com)
The combination of Absio’s technology with GTRI’s security best practices and expert consultants gives customers a unique solution to protect sensitive information in emails and provides a team of security and business specialists that understand all the complex angles of email security.
Email has become a de facto way of doing business and, as such, most of us don’t hesitate to share confidential and sensitive information via this medium. Now that more organizations and individuals are becoming targets of email security breaches, we must take new precautions to protect the information we share via email.
Greg Byles is CEO of GTRI.
