The hack of over 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014 is an event we would be foolish to ignore. Two years after the fact, the company revealed that cyber thieves stole vast amounts of account information, including names, emails, passwords, telephone numbers and answers to some security questions.
Cyber-attacks, identity thefts, corporate and government security breaches are today’s reality, and are not going away. So what can we do to safeguard online accounts and reduce the risks of security breaches?
By now, we know it’s important to change our passwords frequently, to never use the same password twice, to update the security questions we choose, and so on. These are all valid safeguards. And here’s another: stop using email to communicate sensitive or personal information. That may be unrealistic, but we have to remember that email technology was not designed with any degree of privacy or security in mind. In fact, it was never intended to be at the heart of our digital lives; email was designed when the Internet was still in its virtual infancy, and was meant to be used only to exchange messages among people using different kinds of computers.
Since that time, of course, numerous efforts have been made to make email more secure. But the recent Yahoo shutdown highlights the difficulty of such a task.
Encryption to the rescue!
Today, the best and easiest way to protect your digital communications is to encrypt them. Encrypted messaging basically consists of scrambling the data with complex mathematical algorithms that only the intended recipient can decrypt, instead of sending plain text anyone can read.
Encrypting messages is a good idea, but the method has its pros and cons. Encrypted messages are protected across both networks and servers, but encrypting individual messages is a pain. In short, you need to have the encryption key for everyone you want to communicate with securely. Also, everyone who wants to send you encrypted messages needs your public key. For one or two people, that’s not too bad, but think of an organization having to share dozens of documents daily with dozens of contacts. This is where the whole process gets complicated and cumbersome.
A Revolution in File Exchange Security
There is good news, however. To address your secure file transfer issues, new file exchange solutions have been introduced to the market that combine end-to-end security and ease-of-use. This is what XMedius has achieved with its secure file exchange service, XMediusSENDSECURE (SendSecure).
SendSecure is expressly designed to facilitate the exchange of sensitive files and has a number of critical security features. First, all files exchanged are systematically encrypted in both the upload and download processes. Receiving files doesn’t require a user account, but recipients are authenticated via one-time code received via a voice call, an SMS, or an email. Further, all exchanged files are automatically stored in a virtual SafeBox. The SafeBox is ephemeral, and all stored files are automatically purged from the SafeBox based on pre-defined retention policy. Finally, SendSecure is inherently intuitive, so it’s as easy to use as sending an email.
The bottom line is that email technology does not provide a secure way to send, receive, and store sensitive documents. Next-generation file exchange solutions have to be easy to deploy, use and manage, and must be able to integrate seamlessly with contemporary business workflows and procedures.
This is precisely what SendSecure accomplishes. With SendSecure, the next generation of file exchange has arrived.
The original article is penned by Phillip Vera and can be found here.