Gmail’s New Encrypted Messages Feature Opens a Door for Scams

Google announced at the beginning of April that it is launching a streamlined tool that will allow business users to easily send “end-to-end encrypted” emails—an effort to address the longstanding challenge of adding additional security protections to email messages. The feature is currently in beta for enterprise users to try out within their own organization. It will then expand to allow Google Workspace users to send end-to-end encrypted emails to any Gmail user. By the end of the year, the feature will allow Workspace users to send the more secure emails to any inbox. Email spam and digital fraud researchers warn, though, that while the feature will provide a new option for email privacy and security, it will also inevitably spawn new phishing attacks. End-to-end encryption is a protection that keeps data scrambled at all times except on the sender and recipient's devices, and it is difficult to add to the historic email protocol. Mechanisms to do it are typically very complicated ... Read full article.