PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) has released a study indicating that only about 25% of businesses in the UK implement email encryption measures before sending out communications. The remaining 75% of unencrypted emails are viewed as “open books” for hackers to reference.
PWC states that sending unencrypted emails is akin to mailing a postcard without an envelope, where the recipient is always the last to read it. The root cause of this security negligence is that most businesses believe that encrypting emails using modern and systematic methods is too “costly.”
Chris Potter, PWC’s director of security research, asserts that the majority of businesses today do not recognize that the loss of trade secrets can inflict far greater damage on a company than investing in a robust email security system. In some cases, this loss of confidentiality can lead to the collapse of a large enterprise.
Potter further noted that given the current capabilities of hackers, intercepting and reading an email in transit is not particularly difficult. The practice of “hiring” a hacker to eavesdrop on the commercial correspondence of competitors is something businesses are capable of doing.
PWC conducted its study across over 1,000 businesses in the UK, with 88% of these companies equipped with broadband connectivity.
