Preventing Corporate Data Beach

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Preventing Corporate Data Breaches With IDTSOA

Multiple large retailers in recent months have admitted that the data of their consumers and employees has been breached. This kind of catastrophe can be devastating to both profits and reputation. Fortunately, we at IDTSOA can help you implement a number of techniques that you can prevent your business from being the next big name in the data breach headlines.

1. Division of duties

Many major data breaches actually come from within corporations, so stop picturing that shady hacker hunched over his keyboard! Data breaches are most often the result of an employee error, intentional sabotage, or managerial oversight. Sensitive information should be limited to a small team with individual logins and divided duties so that no one person has control of the access to the information.

2. Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt

Data encryption is a process by which the contents of a file are scrambled and encoded so that only someone with an authorized passcode can access the information. It is also a means of storing sensitive information– credit card numbers, health information, etc– securely. It is a federal crime in many places to store sensitive financial information of consumers without encrypting it and storing it securely. If you’re not encrypting, you should be!

3. Be wary of sharing

Do you know how your business partners handle the sensitive information they receive? Allowing third parties to handle your consumers’ information can be asking for trouble. Firms that buy sensitive consumer information or handle sensitive business information are notorious for storing it in easy to reach plain text files or disposing of sensitive information poorly.

4. Proper disposal is key

When your offices dispose of equipment like old hard drives or even paper files, are they simply tossed into a dumpster behind the building, or do you have a department that destroys and deletes sensitive information first? Many businesses have found out the hard way that not wiping your hard drives before you dispose of them can allow someone to salvage files and breach your system.

5. Regularly change passwords– and make them strong

Are you still using the same system login you had when you first started working at your business? If so, then everyone else probably is, too. A good goal is to change passwords twice a year. Also, requiring strong passwords with a combination of capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, as well as banning dictionary words as passwords, can make it significantly harder to breach your system.

6. Quality, not quantity

The firms with the most breaches tend to have the most overworked IT departments, subject to management that pushes lots of working hard, but not working smart. Does your business emphasize quality or quantity? Do you know the programming languages your systems use? Do you know whether or not these languages are prone to backdoors or any other weaknesses? If not, you could be open to a potential breach.
 

Aaron Denton is a writer for IDTSOA, the premier ID theft protection company, specializing in data breach compliance for businesses.

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