How often have you heard someone say, "If you're not doing anything illegal, then you have nothing to hide?" When asked this, I tend to respond with, "OK, then how about you give me the login credentials for all of your email accounts, including the ones you use for personal use?"
I think of this as analogous to allowing a stranger to walk around in your house. Hey, it's OK as long as you've got nothing to hide, right? The point is that, no matter what is contained in our electronic data, most of us want peace of mind in knowing that it isn't being accessed by unauthorized individuals.
A Daily Flood of Sensitive Data
This concern for privacy doesn't just apply to individuals. It applies to businesses as well. Businesses rely on electronic communication to send sensitive information such as invoices, employee records, financial reports, and other confidential data. In fact, around 376 billion emails were sent and received worldwide every day in 2025, and that number is projected to climb toward 424 billion a day by 2028. If this information gets into the wrong hands, it can lead to devastating losses for the company, as well as damage to its reputation.
Recent Breaches, Real Consequences
Consider a few of the breaches that have made headlines in recent years. In 2024, a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare exposed the personal and health information of an estimated 190 million people, making it the largest healthcare data breach in U.S. history. In 2025, the hacking group known as Scattered Spider hit several major retailers, including Marks & Spencer, Co-op, and Harrods, by tricking staff at a third-party vendor into resetting administrator credentials. The resulting attack disrupted operations and exposed customer names, email addresses, birthdates, and physical addresses. Healthcare alone saw the records of more than 275 million people exposed in 2024.
Though different attack vectors were used in each of these cases, much of the targeted information could have been safeguarded if it had been encrypted. When sensitive data is encrypted, even if attackers manage to exfiltrate it, what they walk away with is unreadable. Moreover, all it takes is for one host to be infected with malware to allow the interception and eavesdropping of confidential email content.
Human Error Is Just as Dangerous
Breaches perpetrated by hackers aren't the only threat to a company's data. Human error also poses a significant threat. Accidental disclosure, such as an employee emailing a spreadsheet of Social Security numbers, W-2 forms, or patient records to the wrong recipient, remains one of the most common ways sensitive data leaks out of an organization.
And the lines between human error and outright attack continue to blur. According to IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, phishing has become the single most common way attackers first get in, responsible for 16 percent of breaches at an average cost of $4.8 million. Worse, attackers are now using AI to make these lures more convincing than ever. The report found that 1 in 6 breaches involved attackers using AI, most often to craft phishing messages or deepfake impersonations in minutes rather than hours. In other words, the email sitting unprotected in your outbox or archive is a target whether the threat comes from a clever criminal or a simple mistake.
The email sitting unprotected in your outbox or archive is a target whether the threat comes from a clever criminal or a simple mistake.
The Real Cost of a Breach
The costs of not sufficiently protecting your data are high. IBM's 2025 report put the global average cost of a data breach at $4.44 million. In the United States, the average climbed to a record $10.22 million per breach, driven by higher regulatory fines and the rising cost of detection and response. Regulated industries continue to suffer the most. Healthcare has had the most expensive breaches for 14 years running, reaching an average of $7.42 million, followed by financial services.
Those figures reflect the cost of detecting and containing a breach, legal fees, investigations, fines, remediation, and lost business as customers take their trust elsewhere. (It is worth noting that IBM cautions against applying a single per-record figure to very large breaches, since the largest incidents can exceed these averages by an order of magnitude.) In addition to financial losses, companies may also suffer lasting damage to their reputation.
How Encryption Protects You
How could these incidents have been prevented? If these businesses had encrypted their sensitive data, they could have prevented unauthorized access to confidential information in the event of a breach. Encryption helps protect corporate and financial data of companies, as well as the personal data of their employees and customers. When data is encrypted, even if a user's account has been hacked, the data would still be unreadable. Encryption also helps companies meet strict regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, FERPA, GLBA, and PCI compliance. Encryption solutions also offer the benefit of proof of identity when email messages are digitally signed, ensuring that the message is authentic and verified as having been sent from the purported sender.
Encryption Isn't Just for Big Business
A common misconception about email encryption is that it is only needed for larger businesses. However, small and medium size businesses are targeted just as frequently as large ones, and often can be affected much more severely in the event of an email hack. AI-assisted phishing has made it cheaper and easier than ever for attackers to go after smaller organizations at scale. While a larger company may be able to financially survive a breach (though still at significant loss), a severe data breach could put a small company out of business. This is just one of many reasons why encryption is so important.
Encryption Made Easy with MDaemon
One of the most common challenges for email encryption is that it has had a reputation of being difficult to use, often requiring cumbersome key exchanges and extensive configuration. MDaemon's encryption features were designed for convenience and ease of use, on both the client side and the server side.
On the client side, MDaemon Webmail users can encrypt a message and its attachments directly from the message compose window, with no plugins or separate software to install. On the server side, MDaemon's integrated OpenPGP component, MDPGP, lets administrators automate encryption, decryption, and key management as messages pass through the server. Administrators can enable MDPGP, configure who can use it, and create keys for their users by following the steps outlined in this knowledge base article. MDaemon's Content Filter can also be set up to automatically encrypt messages that contain sensitive content, so protection does not depend on a user remembering to turn it on. You can find more detail on how MDPGP works in the MDaemon documentation.
For protecting messages in transit, MDaemon also supports TLS, which encrypts the connection over which email is sent.
The Bottom Line
No business is too small to protect its sensitive data from theft. If you'd like to ensure your company's emails and attachments are safe, you should always encrypt. A few extra steps now can save a great deal of headache later.
