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It's considered a secure method of document transfer over email, despite email being able to be secured and fax can be hacked with like a length of wire and a knife. Fucking irks me.
Because how many attackers are actually interested in attacking fax? Like... have you ever heard of hackers hacking physical mail? It's to old for people to care, and "people not caring" is implicitely secure by ignorance.
Yeah for sure, but security through obscurity only works until it's actually important or exploitable for monetary gain. I wouldn't even mind that, but e-mail can do so much better and it's treated like a giant security risk.
Because it doesn't have encryption by default, and encryption is not a setting in many public providers + if security works, then only within a single provider, not between them.
I mean, if all the good secret information is going over fax and everyone knows it, sure, people will hack it. Blackhats are in it for the money, not to work with the newest technology. Most of what they do is already mind-numbing grinding.
The main security there is just the security of whatever phone line it's going over. And that's assuming you never dial a wrong number...
Also there is fax spam. I get all these random advertisements faxed to me for companies for window replacement services that don't actually exist, and sometimes fortune tellers. I have no idea why.
How does one hack fax in that fashion?
Fax operates as data over phone line, similar to dialup. If you can get a wiretap on a phone line, you essentially can get everything that passes over it. Technically you could encrypt it, but it's usually not required you do legally.