10 Reasons to Secure your Communications

As you can image we receive numerous questions regarding whether or not you should use encryption. Depending if you’re a business or an individual there are some things you will need to consider. Do you need to protect yourself from physical theft? Are there regulatory compliance standards you are required to follow? Is security paramount in your organization? These are all very valid questions you need to ask. This list has been put together to allow a better understanding of what encryption is used for and whether it is right for you.

1. Workplace Dissent

   More and more workplaces are now monitoring their employees email. Some employees have even been fired because of personal opinions about a co-worker, manager or the workplace in general. It’s as simple as sending an email to a friend or co-worker that is later intercepted and read by management.

2. Political Dissent

   How would you feel if you were forbidden to express your opinion openly? Do you agree with every decision your government makes? Were you aware that the Russian and Chinese governments place restrictions over the use of encryption? What does that say about the usefulness and importance of encryption in protecting the expression of dissent?

3. Business Plans

   The European aerospace company has allegedly lost major contracts due to the interception of electronic communications by the U.S. government’s Echelon information gathering network, when Airbus’ bids for contracts were forwarded to their competitor, Boeing.

4. Financial Information

   A great example is sale orders by email. Do you really want the owners of any computer between you and your recipient to know what your credit card number is? What if you were signing a contract for a new financial investment that contained an attachment with all your confidential information, would you risk identity theft?

5. Eavesdropping

   There are a multitude of sophisticated methods and a wide range of equipment by which all electronic communication can be intercepted. These are used primarily by government agencies, but can also be employed by business rivals and competitors.

6. Regulatory Compliance

   We are finding out more every day as to which law applies to which customer and what they must do about it. Depending on the choices your company makes on this it can be quite costly when you lose your customers personal information.

7. Security

   As you can imagine this is a broad one and can mean a bunch of different things to different people. Let us consider the NSA or Military, in this case you may be asked to meet a certain security level even though your application has little or no "secure" data. This will likely require all data to be secured "at rest" as well as "over the wire", and may even require changes to the application to allow for two factor authentication or other types of security.

8. Common Sense

   If you are on vacation you might send a picture postcard to a friend or family member with a quick "wish you were here" sort of message. But, if you are writing a personal letter to that same friend or family member you would be more inclined to seal it in an envelope.

9. Digitally Signed

   By utilizing a personal certificate to digitally sign your messages you can help to prevent spam and malware from being distributed in your name. If your regular correspondents are conditioned to know that messages from you will contain your digital signature, when they receive an unsigned message with your email address (also known as spoofing) as the source they will realize that it’s not really from you.

10. Privacy

    You may say, "But I have nothing to hide." Most people do not have anything to hide. But still, you lock the doors to your house and car, even though you have nothing to hide. The reason that we lock our homes is to keep people out who shouldn’t be there, and that’s the same reason why you should encrypt your email.

"Nothing to Hide"
is not the same as
"Nothing to Lose"