Like it or not, email is a critical part of our digital lives. It’s how we sign up for accounts, get notifications, and communicate with a wide range of entities online. Critics of email rightfully point out that email suffers from a significant number of flaws that make it less than ideal, but that doesn’t change the current reality. In light of that reality, I believe that an encrypted email provider is a must-have for everyone in today’s age of rampant data breaches, insider threats, warrantless police access, and targeted advertising. If I can get access to your emails, I can get a range of sensitive information including where you bank (to craft more convincing phishing attacks), information about pets (I get notifications each year from the vet for my cats’ annual checkups), calendar reminders, news announcements from family, support tickets from services you use, and more. In a worse case scenario, if I get access to the account itself, it’s trivial to simply issue password reset requests for nearly any of those accounts, have it to sent to said compromised email account, and gain access to a wide number of other accounts you use – from banking to shopping and more – for any number of reasons. So this week, let’s look into the top encrypted email providers The New Oil recommends and their features to help decide which one is right for you.
There is “speculation” spread about every single “privacy” focused service for exactly that reason. If you don’t trust them, you are not using them. I’m not saying don’t be suspicious, but also look at facts that make it unlikely of it being a honeypot.
Right, but there are plenty of easier services to target that provide more sensitive information. If you are a honeypot, you have to be profitable and expand your services or people will move somewhere else. That all takes time and work. Buying other services like SimpleLogin or Standard Notes and integrating their staff into your scheme would be unnecessary complication.
It’s not a story. So called 5 eyes, 9 eyes and 14 eyes refers to country agreements to share intelligence and make cooperation instant instead of having to go through proper channels that take time. I’m sure there are many conspiracy theories about specific things that might not be true, but there is no dispute that these agreements exist.
Government run honeypots are usually facilitated by federal agencies, INTERPOL, or EUROPOL, and if they want to run something in a country where they are not welcome it has to be court approved. Hence, it being run in 14 eyes countries, make it easy. Switzerland on the other hand not only requires everything to be approved by their courts, but also require using their specific privacy laws when making determination, which are the strongest in the world.
You only need to look at previous known honeypots to see where they originate and what they target.