Others have secured their SMTP connections across a VPN – or an entirely private network. Some enterprising people have exploited secure messages (by using tools like PGP/GPG). But Internet email is completely insecure while in transit. Hence, the data may be secure while at rest. In the case of email transfers, the only ‘secure’ element might be a user/password combination on the sender or receiver’s mailbox.These kinds of transfers are NOT inherently secure. Are Personal File Transfers Inherently Secure For many people, these kinds of transfers are secure enough. More recently, secure file transfers could be characterized by trusting a third-party data hosting provider. These people perform a ‘secure file transfer’ by handing the USB stick to a known (and trusted) recipient. Sometimes, people place an un-encrypted file on a USB stick. Most people simply attach an un-encrypted file to an email message that is then sent across an un-encrypted email infrastructure. Today, the “gold standard” probably includes all three of these techniques simultaneously.īut personal file transfer has been quite different. Their methods included virtual private networks, secure encrypted file transfer (sftp and ftps), and transfers of secure / encrypted files. For years, businesses and governments have used secure file transfer to send sensitive files across the Internet.