Earlier this year, the company announced that it was introducing an Enterprise Key Management (EKM) feature that would allow companies that operate in heavily regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and government to choose how they want to encrypt messages, files, and other information shared on the platform.

The bad news: Slack isn't end-to-end encrypted, and it gives a lot of control to companies over how they want to protect their data. That could occur if, for instance, an attacker was on the same network and snagged the data containing the messages or was able to get their hands on the messages while they were being moved between either the sender or recipient and the Slack server. Previously, Slack only encrypted messages at rest, or when they are simply sitting on the Slack server and not moving between parties, which put them at risk of being intercepted. According to the company's security page, it secures your messages both when they are in transit between parties (i.e., when you send them) and when they are at rest. The good news: Slack does encrypt your messages. It would appear as a random string of essentially meaningless letters and numbers. If a malicious actor were to somehow snag the message while in transit, they wouldn't be able to read it because they don't have a key. This works by essentially giving each person's device a digital key that can be used to read the message. When conversations are encrypted, it means that only person sending the message and the person meant to read it can actually discern what the text says. So, just how secure are the conversations that you're having on Slack? Are my Slack messages encrypted?Įncryption is an important feature for any messaging app to ensure that your conversations can't be intercepted by any third parties. Either way, you're absolutely going to want the peace of mind knowing that those bits of private information in your Slack messages are going to remain private. That might mean work files that contain proprietary information, or it might mean office gossip that gets spread through direct messages. But any platform that you do your work on is going to be tasked with handling some sensitive information. One part chat app, one part 'email killer' and business organization tool, the communication platform is an invaluable tool that lets you easily keep in touch with every member of your team. Slack has become the de facto water cooler for thousands of companies, especially in the startup world.

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