- Consultants warn emails despatched with delicate knowledge are nonetheless getting delivered unencrypted, and nobody will get notified
- Microsoft 365 sends e mail in plain textual content when encryption fails, with out alerting the person in any respect
- Google Workspace nonetheless makes use of insecure TLS 1.0 and 1.1 with out warning senders or rejecting messages
Most customers assume that emails despatched by means of cloud companies are encrypted and safe by default, however this won’t at all times be the case, new analysis has claimed.
A report from Paubox discovered Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace each mishandle these failures in ways in which depart messages uncovered, with out notifying the sender or logging the failure.
“Utilizing out of date encryption offers a false sense of safety as a result of it appears as if delicate knowledge is protected, although it really isn’t,” Paubox stated.
Default settings quietly undermine encryption
The issue isn’t only a technical edge case; it stems from how these platforms are designed to function below frequent circumstances.
Google Workspace, the report discovered, will fall again to delivering messages utilizing TLS 1.0 or 1.1 if the receiving server solely helps these outdated protocols.
Microsoft 365 refuses to make use of deprecated TLS, however as an alternative of bouncing the e-mail or alerting the sender, it sends the message in plain textual content.
In each instances, the e-mail is delivered, and no warning is issued.
These behaviors pose critical compliance dangers, as in 2024, Microsoft 365 accounted for 43% of healthcare-related e mail breaches.
In the meantime, 31.1% of breached healthcare entities had TLS misconfigurations, regardless of many of those organizations utilizing “drive TLS” settings to satisfy compliance necessities.
However as Paubox notes, forcing TLS doesn’t assure encryption utilizing safe variations like TLS 1.2 or 1.3, and fails silently when these circumstances aren’t met.
The results of silent encryption failures are far-reaching – healthcare suppliers routinely ship Protected Well being Info (PHI) over e mail, assuming instruments like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace provide sturdy protections.
In actuality, neither platform enforces trendy encryption when failures happen, and each threat violating HIPAA safeguards with out detection.
Federal pointers, together with these from the NSA within the US, have lengthy warned in opposition to TLS 1.0 and 1.1 as a consequence of vulnerabilities and downgrade dangers.
But Google nonetheless permits supply over these protocols, whereas Microsoft sends unencrypted emails with out flagging the problem.
Each paths result in invisible compliance failures – in a single documented breach, Solara Medical Provides paid greater than $12 million after unencrypted emails uncovered over 114,000 affected person data.
Circumstances like this present why even the best FWAAS or ZTNA solution should work in live performance with seen, enforceable encryption insurance policies throughout all communication channels.
“Confidence with out readability is what will get organizations breached,” Paubox concluded.
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