[baubino]

I’m in the midst of a similar situation. My firstinitial.lastname email keeps getting very sensitive legal documents from law firms handling the case of someone who does not seem to know what their actual email address is. I called the firm and told them they needed to have an in-person meeting with their client and get a correct email address from them. That seemed to help for a few months. But now I’m getting emails again from a different law firm.

[catoc]

Law firms that send very sensitive legal documents over email… #sigh

I’d switch firms immediately if that’s their level of opsec awareness

[stackskipton]

And I worked IT for legal firm, if we were not sending documents over email, we would get replaced by the client.

I spent 3 months on secure document transfer portal system, got scrapped after 4 months because clients wanted their forms as Word/PDF and they wanted them without hopping through any hoops.

[catoc]

I believe you - convenience gets picked over security all the time

[giancarlostoro]

If you reread again it sounds as if the secretary was hanging out the wrong email.

[catoc]

Yes I know this was about wrong delivery address (person with same name, wrong account); the point is that email is not completely secure - certainly not for very sensitive (legal) content

[eru]

What are you talking about? If you send emails from eg GMail to Gmail, it's fairly secure.

[basilgohar]

Gmail can be fetched via IMAP and leave Gmail's infra entirely. And I don't think Google guarantees that their implementation stays fully on their own owned infra. It's a reasonable assumption but I'd never trust that for a security guarantee.

Email is not an end-to-end secure data protocol without the use of client side encryption/decryption like PGP/GPG, but even then, sender/receiver and time are all in the envelop metadata.

[catoc]

Yeah, that exactly my point - no idea why I’m being downvoted on this

[giancarlostoro]

Probably because Law Firms arent necessarily computer security firms. Lots of people have terrible op sec. Additionally if you the recipient are on gmail it stops mattering, now Google knows your legal woes.

[catoc]

Exactly, I’d never use Gmail for anything sensitive. Even for just personal emails I use my own mailserver. (And again, for truly sensitive stuff I don’t use email at all)

[dahart]

Why’s that even relevant if the recipient is the wrong address? Email isn’t particularly secure anywhere, and gmail has forwarding and IMAP and aliases and other services that send emails outside of gmail. But sending sensitive documents to the wrong recipient, which was the topic that started this sub-thread, is a case where it does not matter how secure your servers are.

[eru]

> [...] and gmail has forwarding and IMAP and aliases and other services that send emails outside of gmail.

No matter what format you hand a recipient a document in, they can always make a photocopy and pass it on.

[dahart]

Sure. How’s that relevant?

[eru]

That someone might use IMAP is no worse than someone using a photocopier.

[catoc]

Even if the law firm uses a Gmail account - which most of course don’t - Google still has access to your sensitive legal email content. (And that’s apart from the meta data leaking)

[ArnoVW]

if you attach documents by linking to a Google Drive document, sure.

if you attach documents 'inside' the mail (i.e. MIME encoded multipart) that is most definitely not secure.

1) you do not know how that mail gets delivered, not necessarily via servers that support encryption 2) you do not know how that mail, or the attachment, gets stored on the local machine 3) you do now know if the mail, or attachment, is sent to someone else 4) you cannot revoke the access to the document once the Need To Known stops

In our ISMS, sending Highly Sensitive data (ex: customer data) by attaching directly to a mail, is strictly not allowed by the IT charter. We explain it during an on-boarding meeting to all new staff members. And it's a fireable offense.