Securely sending documents

[Farakh Zaman]

Hi all,

Wanted to see what everyone uses to send sensitive information.  Email is obviously the easiest and least secure way.  If you use drop box or something like that, it is a bit more secure...and then there are paid services like securesafe that I saw which encrypt & pw protect your files when you send them.  

Just wanted to see what everyone used.

Thanks.

FZ

[Brett Coryell]

I'm very new to real estate but I'm in IT as my career field so I feel I can give some sound advice.  When we talk about allowing secure transmission of a document, there really is a sense in which the recipient has to be part of the discussion.  

I've seen lots of scenarios where the correct and safe transmission of a document, either paper or electronic, is followed by exposing that document to people who shouldn't see it because on the recipient's end it gets printed out, lost, left in a cab, saved in unencrypted form, forwarded to their personal Gmail account, and too many other examples to mention.

If you're sending to a bank or other corporate entity, their IT department may have an idea of how they expect to receive and store sensitive documents.  Apart from that, we just have to choose a level of risk we can accept.

As an IT person, I would tell you that for routine small business needs, sharing files as a link to a cloud drive (ShareFile, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, or OneDrive) is probably fine.  Just watch out for your sharing permissions.  Set up a folder for each deal you do and only share that folder with the specific person you need to.

If you want to send secure email, you again have to trust that the person on the other end isn't letting their eight year old install malware on their business laptop (true story) so that it gets infected and all your files get shared with hackers in another country.  But assuming you can't know that, then the security of the email you send depends entirely on the email system that your recipient is using.  

If you want to receive and store email securely, I would never use Yahoo.  Their security practices are atrocious and have been in the news in the last year.  Gmail is okay if you don't want legal assurances.  Microsoft's Office365 (buy business license, not a personal one) will give you more assurances in writing.  Also, pro tip:  use only the web client and never download the email or attachments into Outlook or any other mail app running on your desktop or laptop computer.

Finally if you want to send encrypted email then I recommend a product called Virtru.  It's not free but it's dead simple to use.  You can send encrypted email safely to people who are not using a secure email system because Virtru acts as a middle man and forces you to view the encrypted email on their server instead of passing it on to your insecure recipient.  And, as my favorite feature, you can revoke someone's ability to view that email at any time or after a predetermined period of time.

Sorry it's long, but I hope that helps.

Brett