how can hackers read emails in transit? In addition to phishing for account details and accessing someone’s email account directly, is it possible for hackers to “read” ongoing email communication that is not encrypted?
In: Technology
The most basic answer is, yes they technically can but because of the current encryption technologies they most likely cannot.
Without getting into too much technical details, emails are encrypted from end to end using unique keys which only the sender and the receiver has. Basically, it is very easy to acquire the encrypted emails (simply perform a MITM attack), but the difficult part is decrypting those emails, which is next to impossible for your average hacker.
But, you said email communication that is **not** encrypted. So basically yeah you can definitely do that and it wouldn’t be that hard either. However, in the real world, cases like that practically don’t exist because all major email providers like GMail uses encryption.
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