The need for secure email attachments

The massive work from home shift many of us experienced this year brought an elevated wave of cyber crime. We turned to home networks, and sometimes Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), for work, school and community interaction. And, we relied on email as a universal platform for sharing some of our most confidential ideas, intellectual property and sensitive data. That made secure email attachments more important than ever.

Unfortunately bad guys jumped to take advantage of our general confusion and stress. We need to fully understand and protect against the risks. Because email is the foundation of every organization’s collaboration, productivity and character, leaks aren’t just data loss events; they’re attacks on your brand and reputation.

Email security still lags

Mobile apps like Signal, iMessage, Wickr and Threema have all provided simple methods for end-to-end encrypted communications directly from our phones, yet there’s still a significant amount of difficulty associated with email encryption when it comes to scale.

For the last decade, PGP has been the gold-standard for encrypted email, but remember: 10 years ago, it was also the only option, which led to the rise of PGP as a household security tool. At the same time it also fueled a new breed of email encryption solution providers including ProtonMail, Zix and others.

Fast forward to today and many businesses have still ignored or downplayed the importance of securing commonly sent Microsoft Outlook, Google Gmail or other attachments. That’s because doing so is overly cumbersome to scale and manage. Therefore, companies are still using PGP, which is why many security professionals unsurprisingly don’t feel well equipped to defend against email-based attacks.

Frictionless Data Encryption Can Make the Difference

We need a better solution for the vulnerability businesses face, from digital malware and breaches to collaboration data accidentally or willfully falling into the wrong hands. This year has proven that we really can’t wait any longer.

VERA offers a simple, user-friendly way to send encrypted secure email attachments that will secure sensitive content wherever it travels. Must be magic, right? Not really. Here’s how it works:

• Each VERA-protected file is encrypted with a unique key that is secured within the VERA Cloud Platform.
• These keys are transmitted securely via TLS/SSL to the clients that form a trusted key space on the end user’s device.
• Audit logs for every successful and unsuccessful access request to a document are also recorded.
• Keys are not stored locally on the endpoint unless the policy owner specifically grants that privilege for offline or time-bound access.

Any user’s access to any file can be revoked at any time, regardless of where the data is at the moment. Best of all, VERA’s military-grade encryption, security and policy attaches directly to the data itself, providing granular control in a way that is transparent to the user. Frictionless security is security that will actually be used.