When Organizations Do Not Use Email Encryption

When Organizations Do Not Use Email Encryption

For this article, I had originally written it a few months ago. However, I didn’t get the chance to post it at that time. And, in a fortunate and positive way it turns out that my post will be some what less relevant than originally intended for the readers. When I initially had started this article, I had noticed an issue which seems to crop up anytime I am working with an organization. Many important organizations still lack basic security tools and options. In the example of this article, it looks into the lack of use of email encryption and secure email systems.

Now before I get into the nitty gritty stuff I want to list out a disclaimer. Everything I conduct, list, and discuss on my blog is and has always been for educational purposes. None of my articles are made or should be used to attack machines out there. All information on my blog is for the better purpose of learning better security methods.

Disclaimer

Now this article is not meant to bash government organizations in any way what so ever. This article is here to teach that any and all types of organizations can easily lack basic security measures. (more…)

SMTP Authentication

Hello everyone.

I am back with some more email security!

Today I’d like to talk about SMTP Authentication.
Some people may never have heard of this concept or may have simply ignored it as it seemingly may not feel that important.

However, in certain situations one may need to make use of SMTP Auth for email.

SMTP Authentication

SMTP Authentication – Outgoing Emails

As shown above in the diagram.

SMTP Auth is fairly simply to use for all incoming or outgoing emails.

Essentially, a machine has to authenticate with the central mail server.

The authentication can be done in various ways.

You can normally query LDAP, Active Directory, or some other identity management system as well as store the credentials on the mail server (not recommended).

How Does It Work?

(more…)

SSL Cert Options

SSL Certificates

To Start off, I am going to break this post into many parts.
This will be part 1

So lately, I have been looking at different SSL Cert options that are out there for your applications and machines.

Let’s face it unless you’re a small to large business you may not see a huge investment with SSL certs.

Personally, I think  it’s a general good practice most people should adopt it for everything.
I’ve seen some people complain that adding a layer of SSL decreases server performance.

In my opinion most machines these days are fairly powerful.
Or, at least powerful enough to take on something like SSL, so I don’t see that as a very valid excuse at all.

The main reason people may not wish to make use of SSL is due to the costs, or the lack of knowledge on how to properly make use of one.

And, my hope is to find a reliable SSL Cert CA, that also is reasonably priced and affordable for the average blog poster.

I found an interesting website that actually did an analysis on this issue awhile back.

(more…)