The Majority of Data Breaches in 2018 Came from Inside the House

Are you a business owner seeking ways to protect against a data breach?

In 2017, there were 1,549 data breaches compromising almost 179 million data files in the United States alone!

Threats to your company’s data are not only caused by external forces. In 2018, 40 percent of data breaches took place at businesses by internal means.

Although there is a high percentage of data breaches caused internally, there are steps you can take to prevent accidental employee data leaks.

Read on to learn more about data breaches in 2018 and how you can protect your business inside the house!

Hire The Right People

One of the most effective ways to prevent a cybersecurity breach is to hire the right people.

But what makes a potential employee the right person?

You should spend time looking closely at an employee’s background. During the interview process, you should also get a sense of how they handle the responsibilities of their job.

It’s important to understand how proactive they are about preventing data breaches. One way to combat this threat in the workplace is to ensure that your employees pay attention to detail.

This way you can help to eliminate the risk posed by sending a careless email or not shredding important documents.

Participate in Regular Employee Training

Internal training sessions of your employees should be geared toward data breach prevention.

To be most useful, this training should take place at regular intervals throughout the year. Some of the topics you should cover include password protection on computer systems, proper file storage, and the disposal of documents.

Password Protection

Protecting passwords to email accounts and business programs is crucial to preventing a data breach. This is particularly important in the digital age.

Your IT team should make users include many different characters in their passwords. This helps to guard against the threat of a password being guessed by someone else.

The popularity of the internet and computers mean a cybersecurity breach can spread fast. This can cost your customers, sales, and thousands of dollars to fix the problem.

Cybercriminals will steal an estimated 33 billion digital files from Americans by the year 2023. Don’t let your business be part of this statistic!

Proper Storage

Storing files in a secure manner so that they are not easily accessible by other people in and out of the company. For example, your files may need to be stored in a secure room or other portion of your office.

Besides being stored in a secure room, you should also limit the number of employees who have access to these stored documents. A file monitoring also helps you to better follow who receives documents and when they are returned.

Disposing Documents

If your office is not paperless, the disposal of documents is also a very important aspect of protecting your data. Train your employees to properly dispose of documents containing sensitive information.

One effective way to address this issue is to have secure disposal containers throughout your office. These containers are locked and usually emptied by a trusted third party each month.

This keeps the flow of documents moving in and out of your office. It also allows you to maintain more order in your workplace. Taking these measures helps reduce the likelihood of falling victim to a data breach.

Invest in IT Protection Services

You will benefit from investing in IT protection services for your business.

An experienced IT company has a team of professionals who can test every aspect of your network. They can use the results to identify potential problem areas.

This includes performing IT assessments and audits will show you areas where your business may be vulnerable to a data breach.

An IT security company can also help your business zero in on potential internal threats.

This will save you time and money, as you are able to focus on running your business and avoiding using manpower toward IT security.

Protecting Your Digital Files

The popularity of computers and mobile devices in the workplace can create a growing concern about data security. That’s because your data can be accessed from remote locations and fall into the hands of the wrong person.

Here are some ways that you can protect your data from an unexpected breach:

Using Read-Only Documents

One way to help combat this threat is to adopt a read-only policy for documents that are accessed via mobile devices.

A read-only file can only be opened and/or read by the recipient. It cannot be modified, renamed, or delete this file, which helps protect it to some extent when it is accessed by someone else.

Require a Password For Your Files

Password protecting your files helps to secure them from being accessed by people who shouldn’t. This applies to both internal employees and external threats.

When you require a password to open a file and read its contents, this is an added layer of protection in your IT system.

Let’s use the example of an employee who has his or her cell phone stolen that contains emails on their work account.

This creates concern about the thief sending and receiving emails. It is also a threat that they look through what exists on the account.

If the attachments to emails are password protected, this can limit the value of them to someone else.

Wrapping Up: Data Breaches in 2018

Data breaches in 2018 have taught us that the threat to information exists everywhere. A data breach can strike businesses of all sizes and across almost any industry.

In June 2018, the public server Exactis had a data breach that compromised the information of 300 million users. Some of the information obtained included member preferences, phone numbers, and addresses.

For more than two decades, the team at New York Nerds has served the IT needs of the tri-state area.

We are available 24 hours each day and 365 days each year. We will work with your company to identify your unique IT needs and propose solutions.