Data breaches can be costly because they take a while to identify. This number has grown by 6.4% since 2017. The average cost of a data breach in 2018 is $3.86 million. Since 2013, over 13 billion data records have been lost or stolen. If the hacker can’t read your message because it’s encrypted, they can’t do anything with the information. Why is Email Encryption Important?Įmail encryption is important because it protects you from a data breach. The private key can also be used to digitally “sign” a message so the recipient knows it came from you. It is stored somewhere safe and private on the person’s computer and only that person has access to it. The private key is used to decrypt emails. If someone wanted to send you an email with sensitive information, they would use your public key to encrypt it. This public key is what is used to encrypt the email. The public key is stored on a key server along with the person’s name and email address, and can be accessed by anyone. Each person is assigned a public and private key in the form of digital code. The public key infrastructure (PKI) is used to encrypt and decrypt emails.
What is Email Encryption?Įmail encryption is essentially mixing up the contents of an email so it becomes a puzzle that only you have the key to solve.
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We explain how to encrypt emails on multiple providers and summarize our tips in an infographic. They will only have to hack into a few emails rather than sift through hundreds to find data they can use.
If only some of your emails are encrypted, it is a red flag for a hacker and could make your inbox even less secure. When encrypting emails, it’s important to encrypt all of them, not just the ones with sensitive information. Sensitive information such as social security numbers, passwords, login credentials and bank account numbers are vulnerable when sent via email. Email encryption is the process of disguising the content of your email messages to protect them from being read by unwanted parties.