Why you should assume your e-mail will get hacked or leaked eventually

The Podesta leak hasn’t just been embarrassing for John Podesta, it has also been embarrassing for many other Hillary Clinton campaign staffers who communicated with him. Also exposed were numerous other people in the progressive movement who either included Podesta in e-mail chains or had their e-mails forwarded to Podesta after the fact. So even if you’re extremely careful with your own online security, your private messages could still be exposed if anyone you correspond with is careless.

Your e-mails could also become public if, say, a former colleague becomes disgruntled and decides to deliberately leak embarrassing private e-mails to the press. Another danger is that your e-mail provider itself could be hacked. In Sept, we learned that hackers broke into Yahoo’s e-mail servers, gaining access to 500 million accounts. So far, it doesn’t appear that the culprits have released any of that information to the public, but whoever was responsible for the leaks likely has a great deal of juicy information they could release in the future. If you’re a prominent person — and especially if you’re a senior adviser to a presidential candidate or world leader — you should take the possibility of getting hacked very seriously. That partly means doing everything you can to lock down your e-mail service — by enabling two-factor authentication and ensuring everyone in your workplace or organization gets thorough training on e-mail security. But it also means you should be careful about what you write in an e-mail. Because there’s a very real risk that anything you write down and send over the Internet will eventually become available to the whole world.