"An individual with nothing to hide may well be an individual with nothing to offer."
Email Privacy
EmailPrivacy.info investigates the risks of compromising your email privacy and security and offers you the ways of reducing these risks to a minimum.
Overview
The Internet provides us with one of the easiest communication tools ever afforded to the mankind. It is quick, convenient, cheap... and is as unprivate as it could be while being so quick, convenient, and cheap. Email is as public as a postcard! Every message you send through the Internet can easily be snatched and scanned for interesting details by anyone having the necessary know-how. Privacy is virtually nonexistent online. You might ask, "Why should I worry about privacy? I'm not a criminal or a terrorist. I've got nothing to hide." If you really mean that, you probably shouldn't be here reading thit article after all. Show me an email user who has got no financial, sexual, social, political, or professional secrets to keep from his family, neighbors or colleagues, and I'll show you that this person is either an extraordinary exhibitionist or an incredible dullard. Show me a company that has no trade secrets or confidential records and I'll show you that its business is not very successful.
Email-related Threats to Your Privacy
The Threat of Information Leaks
Most electronic mail is notoriously UNPRIVATE. Sending an email is less secure and in many ways is more dangerous than sending your personal or business message on a postcard. Intercepting Internet email is a piece of cake for certain people. Your typical email message travels through many computers. And at each of those computers people can gain access to your personal and business correspondence. You can make a bet that administrators (not to mention hackers) on Bulletin Board Systems, college campus systems, commercial information services, and Internet hook-up providers can read your email. Of course, most snoops will deny that they are reading your email because they want to continue doing it. Information is power. Snoops want power.
Article About Encryption.
Article About Digital Signature.
Article About Secure Connection.
The Threat of Mail Tracing
Every email contains headers, and in most cases the tracing of an email begins with the examination of its message-header information. A message header is part of an email that travels through the Internet. It contains the source of the email and lists every point the email has passed on its journey along with the date and time of passing it.
Since this "post stamp" is rather unsightly and useless for correspondents, email programs normally hide it. But for snoops it's a valuable source of information. For example, it contains one or more IP addresses that can be traced back to you, your Internet service provider or organization. So, you should keep it in mind that any mail admin can glance at your mail and learn your country, city, IPS, maybe even your telephone number and so on. Besides, tracing an IP address is essential for most hack attack.
Article About Remailers.
The Threat of Trojans
Trojan Horses, and now there are more than one thousand of them (including modifications and variants) that are circulating around, are relatively new and belong to probably the most dangerous kind of viruses that have appeared in recent times. They are much harder to detect than viruses or worms since they are often deployed with recompiled file names and attributes. They range from simple programs that log keystrokes as you type on your PC (and that can be used to steal information and passwords) to full-blown remote control Trojans such as Back Orifice and Sub Seven which make commercial remote control packages like PC Anywhere look lame. They literally give hackers the full control over any compromised machine. The worst thing is that all these processes are hidden from users who might be sitting in front of their own machines working on a document at the time.
Article About Trojans.
The Threat of Spam
As well as consuming bandwidth and slowing down email systems, spam is a frustrating time-waster forcing you to sift through and delete mounds of junk mail. It proves irritating and offensive to recipients who feel their privacy has been invaded and could also result in valid emails being discarded along with the junk mail.
Also, spam or any other unsolicited message could be used to convince you to reveal sensitive information about yourself or internal computer systems; a message posing as an online survey could ask recipients for their passwords. The survey could also ask for other information which may allow an attacker to gain valuable intelligence prior to launching another type of attack.
There are more reasons which will make you want to protect your privacy than we have listed here. The important principal is that you have the right for privacy as long as this right is used within the bounds of the law. Seeking privacy should not make one feel guilty; privacy should be expected and demanded.
