Secure Email

Thunderbird Account, Screen Capture, 4/10/11, Karina Mills

After finishing my Secure Email Project, I learned a lot about how to secure my email to prevent problems like viruses. I learned both how to digitally sign and encrypt my email. The digital signature provides verification of who the sender really is. When we encrypt data, we are converting the readable data into unreadable characters in order to protect unauthorized access to the data. That encrypted data then needs to be decrypted in order to read it.

The picture shows both the signed and encrypted emails that were sent to my professor.


This information has proved useful in light of recent events with hackers in the media.

Email systems hacked at Kroger, Disney, and New York & Co.   
Allison Hillaker, 4.04.2011

This Article that I found explains that the email systems were hacked at a number of retailers. Epsilon, the email service provider, was the place that was directly hacked, resulting in the exposure of customer names and emails. The retailers immediately sent out emails to their customers informing them of this debacle in order to prevent any further damage. There is no note of how many people were seriously or remotely affected, but this event goes to show how vulnerable information really is, even when there are securities against it.