Posts Tagged ‘encrypted’
Wednesday, April 15th, 2015
Everyone always harps on the necessity of privacy when discussing health care, government, and banking communications. It is surprising how little attention is paid to email security with regards to accounting and tax preparation. There is a real danger of identity theft, unintended information disclosure, as well as invasion of privacy when using tax preparation services or organizations that do not use secure email. Why is this?
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Tags: accountant, accounting, documents, email, encrypted, identity theft, password recovery, password-protected file, private labeled, quickbooks, secure email, secureline, security, social security number, tax, tax prep, tax returns
Posted in Business Solutions, LuxSci Library: Security and Privacy
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Monday, October 20th, 2014
No, your computer can’t catch the actual Ebola virus… its not even airborn yet. However, we are finding that criminals are taking advantage of the hype and scare and curiosity over Ebola to infect people’s computers more easily.
This is commonly being done via email. There are four prevalent types of email going around now that are meant to infect your computer:
- A fake report on the Ebola virus — when you click the link to read more, your Windows machine is infected with a virus that can collect and steal your personal information.
- A fake email from telecommunications provider that contains an important “Ebola Presentation” for your to download and view. If you do it, you install malware that can allow others to remotely control your computer, access your web cam, log what you type, etc.
- Fake emails talking about an “Ebola Cure” which contains a malware attachment and which asks you to forward the news on to your friends. The malware records your keystrokes and downloads additional malware on to your computer
- Fake emails about Ebola news and lists of “precautions”.
There are many other types of attacks and attack vectors that are being and can be exploited. We will go over many of these, below, and how to protect yourself from them. You should be very wary of any email received about Ebola, even if it appears to be from a friend. You should be especially wary of opening any attachments sent through email, unless you have good confidence that they are malware-free.
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Tags: attachments, ebola, email, encrypted, file, infect, link, malware, phishing, skim, spam, spf, virus, zip
Posted in LuxSci Library: Security and Privacy
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Tuesday, January 7th, 2014
You buy a HIPAA compliant web hosting infrastructure. You configure your web site to send out email messages in the simplest way, e.g. through PHP mail, or some other generic and standard mechanism. You think you are all set — but you are not.
HIPAA compliant web hosting services provide a server infrastructure that allows you to be compliant; however, it doesn’t make you compliant. Your web designers must make choices and program your site so that it properly respects ePHI. If they do not do all the appropriate things, you will be out of compliance. E.g. see: 7 steps to make your web site HIPAA-secure.
In particular, email messages sent in the “normal way” from a web site will go out insecurely in a way that will violate the HIPAA Security Rule if they contain ePHI of any kind. E.g. they will not be encrypted and will not be archived.
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Tags: archived, compliance, encrypted, ePHI, hipaa, secure email, secureform, web hosting, web site
Posted in LuxSci Library: HIPAA
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Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Read receipt requests are generally an extremely unreliable way to find out if your recipient has read an email messages that you have sent to him/her.
Why? Because
- Some email programs do not support read receipts, and thus messages viewed with these would never send you a notice that the message was read.
- Programs that do support read receipts allow the user to respond to them “always”, “never”, or “ask each time” … with “asking each time” being the default. As a result, users often will decline your request for a receipt that you have read the message.
However, when messages are sent via LuxSci’s SecureLine Escrow encryption service, read receipts are guaranteed to work.
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Tags: delivery notice, encrypted, escrow, notice, read receipt, retract, retracting, secureline
Posted in New Feature Announcements
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Saturday, February 14th, 2009
We recently discussed email security for accountants and mentioned that the use of password-protected files is not usually a very good solution for meeting data privacy needs. After writing this and getting some feed back, we thought that the issue of password-protected files really deserves some further discussion. Many people are under the assumption that if they use the “password protection” features of whatever software they are using, that their data is safe and secure. However, this is not necessarily the case. Why?
Using password-protected files to secure data is fast and easy and built into many applications. Why not use it? Certainly, password protecting files is much better than not doing so. However, there are several things that determine how secure these “protected” files really are.
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Tags: aes, brute force, dictionary, digital signature, encrypted, excel, insecure, microsoft word, office 2007, one note, password, password protected, password recovery, password-protected files, Password-Protected PDF, password-to-modify, pdf, pgp, powerpoint, s/mime, secureline, ssl, strong encryption, winzip, zip
Posted in LuxSci Library: Security and Privacy
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