Secure Email Project

Hello everybody,

Mozilla Thunderbird user interface

Today I will talk about the Secure Email Project of my Computing in the Business Environment Course. In this project we used Mozilla Thunderbird to create an encrypted email and send it to the professor of the course. Encryption means using a specific algorithm to transform your data into secure data that can only be accessed with a certain key that can transform the data back into its original state. It is a very useful security measure and is used to protect data from theft. The actual purpose is protecting the data even if thieves get access to it because they still will not be able to use it without the key. In our project, we encypted emails and so made them safe in this way. The following screenshot of my Thunderbird interface shows those emails.

My Mozilla Thunderbird user interface containing the emails received from the professor

 In an interesting article about the hacking attack at Epsilon (http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/04/08/the-epsilon-hack-attack-time-for-sox-for-consumers/) the author talks about this attack as something that could have been prevented by using encryption. Epsilon is an e-mail marketing firm in possession of an enormous amount of consumer email addresses. Last week, hackers found their way past the firewalls of the company into their hard drives. On these hard drives they found all the unprotected email addresses and copied them to use them for phishing and other criminal purposes.The author argues that those firewalls protecting all the private user email addresses obviously were not enough and that they should have been protected on the hard drives. Consumer information has to be kept confidential and secure by law and people of course want companies to keep their information in safe places. This is why the author thinks encryption should be required by law to make data more safe. I agree with him because I do not want to change my email address just because some marketing company was unable to protect it.

Sources:

My Mozilla Thunderbird user interface

http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/04/08/the-epsilon-hack-attack-time-for-sox-for-consumers/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption