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
They either need access to your machine (easiest), access to your mailserver via your credentials (super easy) or access to the server itself (med), be your ISP (lol) or set up a man in the middle (hard), or have access to the mailserver or machine of the recipient.
Encryption only prevents the man in the middle reading your email as it’s only encrypted in transit (like SSL) and not at rest on the servers.
It’s an outdated, insecure protocol that shouldn’t be used for anything but sending electronic post cards. Assume everything you send is a postcard that others can read unless you are using additional encryption to ensure the messages contents are encrypted at rest too such as PGP/GPG.
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