INTERNET SAFETY OF SME REGARDING THE SECURITY OF ELECTRONIC MAIL

Abstract

In today's business, use of electronic mail is practically inevitable. Most of the relevant information of an organization in one way or another is transmitted by e-mail, either as an attachment or as a part of the message content. Therefore businesses care about protection of information sent by e-mail. In doing so, the organization of protection doesn't depend much on the size of a company or an organization, the problems are very similar. Here must be noted that large organizations have at their disposal more resources, but also that such organizations are more interesting and more vulnerable to attacks. However, the development of information technology has provided even the "excess" capacities of eavesdropping systems, so lately email monitoring is practically brought down to individual users. In the first part of the paper security of electronic mail and electronic communication is analyzed in the light of the scandal caused by Edward Snowden's publishing of classified information about the monitoring of electronic communications in The Guardian journal and on his Web site as well as in his statements. In the second, more voluminous part the article, the organization of e-mail transmission, as well as the critical points in the chain of transmission of messages where the message can be attacked, lost, or "only" late are analyzed. Also, here are presented some options for e-mail encryption protection in variants: "end-to-end", server - server, and client - server. Certain consideration is given to risks of storing mails at second or third hand. At the end of the article, there are discussed some legal aspects, the available legislation and protection of electronic messages using electronic signatures and public and private keys for encryption. In the conclusion, it is stated that based on the previous analyses it can be concluded that there is virtually no technology that ensures absolute protection of messages and that it is not enough to protect an important message during its trip through cyber space and that the message should be protected from its creation to its reading and archiving. Also, it is not to be expected that the situation with mail security will be improved with new legislation. Hunger for data explodes.