The latest feature will make security threats not a Gmail users’ concern anymore. The tech giant committed to release a new system alerting users about the risk of opening unencrypted email. Thanks to this information, email will be getting more and more secure.
The search company is putting its efforts on warnings customers when messages from unencrypted sources are received. It claimed that when these unsecure messages or emails appearing in users’ inbox, it will give them a warning that the emails is unsafe to open.
Gmail will release a new system alerting users about the risk of unencrypted email
“Many email providers don’t encrypt messages while they’re in transit. When you send or receive emails with one of these providers, these messages are as open to snoopers as a postcard in the mail,” Google claimed.
Because there is a large number of email providers that do not encrypt emails by default, the warnings within the next few months will be necessary for any users. It’s surprising to mention that most providers do encrypt messages, including Yahoo, Microsoft, and so on.
However, Google and other email providers are trying to change this situation, as more than 62 percent of emails sent to Gmail addresses by other users are now being encrypted over the last few years. Besides, emails sent from a Gmail address to another Gmail address are always encrypted, while emails sent from Gmail to other providers are encrypted 82% of the time. Unencrypted messages are a problem because they make for a great target for hackers.
Recently, Google has been co-operated with the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois in a joint project to study how email security has evolved. According to the reports, 94% of messages sent to Gmail can now be authenticated, making it much harder for phishers to intercept messages.
Google has been co-operated with 2 universities to study how email security has evolved
However, the bad news revealed researchers also found that there are “regions of the Internet actively preventing message encryption by tampering with requests to initiate SSL connections.”
Google now continues to develop methods to identify whether an email originates from just such an encrypted connection or not and build an alert system to warn Gmail users when they receive an email message through unsecure connections.
Another problem identified is shady DNS servers, the systems that direct your browser to the correct IP address to connect to websites and services. These malicious servers serve up fake data when users are looking to get to Gmail, possibly allowing tampering with mail traffic. Fortunately, this is a relatively rare case as Google said.
If encryption was being interfered with, an email may have been altered or loaded with malware in form of fake data from an already known correspondent. These upcoming warnings are expected to prevent that. Google is still co-operating with experts to stop these kinds of attacks. Though the details haven’t released yet, Google promised to launch these notifications in the coming months.