In recent weeks, the news has been filled with stories of high profile data breaches, including the theft from the European Central Bank of some 20,000 email addresses. Behind the sensational headlines is a more important story for both corporations and government entities―everyone is a target and all data is fair game.
In the case of the European Central Bank, the information stolen wasn’t “traditional” identity theft data, such as credit card numbers or social security numbers, lifted from the bank’s accountholder files. It was information harvested from a database used to collect attendee information for events.
We point this out because it shows that a wide array of data is vulnerable and companies don’t have to process and store credit card details to be at risk. Email addresses, names and phone numbers―items that many companies do not routinely encrypt or otherwise safeguard with stringent security―can still be valuable to cybercriminals for a variety of activities including phishing attacks, fraudulent solicitations and more.
This is of major concern because, per the Ponemon Institute, only seven percent of companies are aware of the locations of all their sensitive corporate data including email addresses and other documents. We view this statistic as a signal of potential disaster.
Do you know where all your digital assets reside―even mailing lists and other “less sensitive” data? Do you have policies, processes and mechanisms to ensure this information is protected and is never shared or collected inappropriately? Does your security solution warn you if any entity―inside or out―attempts to gain unauthorized access to any of your data? If not, we would be happy to schedule a security assessment to determine where you are and how you can mitigate these enormous risk factors. For more information, call 877.841.8069, email info@interdev.com or visit www.interdev.com today.