6 Ways to Protect Your Business From Employee Data Theft
While organizations have invested heavily in protecting their sensitive data, even the world’s most sophisticated companies often overlook a persistent risk when it comes to potential data theft: their employees.
What is employee data theft?
Employee data theft has been a long-standing concern for all employers. Also known as data exfiltration, data extrusion, data exportation, or simply unauthorized transfer of data, as businesses rely more and more on electronically-stored information across a variety of platforms and services, the risk is ever increasing.
A company’s intellectual property (IP) is one of its most valuable and discernible assets and can include trade secrets, client data and marketing strategy. Often, IP proves critical to providing an organisation with a competitive edge within its relevant market.
Why do employees steal company data?
Data is coming under increasingly close focus within businesses, and as it is more readily available, it becomes more pertinent and accessible for staff to siphon off when they do eventually exit the organisation. Corporate data exfiltration occurs for a number of reasons and through various scenarios.
What confidential data do employees target?
The type or nature of data that individuals would attempt to take depends on the specific industry that a company operates in and what is classed as invaluable, proprietary data. However, the type of data an employee is most likely to steal is the information needed to do their specific job or relating to strategic plans, usually, information that is readily available to them within the business but harmful if in the wrong hands.
Which businesses are most at risk?
Data theft is a widespread concern across all business industries. As such, there are no defined patterns that indicate prevalence in certain industries; from our experience, the motivation is unique in every instance, although it is often individuals with an interest in sales and/or marketing strategy accused of data extrusion.
What are the consequences of employee data theft?
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has warned that the action of employees taking the proprietary information of their employer unauthorized when leaving a business is a criminal offence. Unlawfully obtaining or accessing personal data is a criminal offence under section 55 of the Data Protection Act 1998. The offence is punishable by a fine – up to S$9,000 in a magistrate’s court or an unlimited fine in a crown court.
Here are the 6 ways to protect your business from employee data theft.
1. Assess what data you need to protect most
Your organization most likely uses multiple applications, third-party partners, and an expansive workflow. The reality is that your data is probably not contained within a few secured systems. Taking the time to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment provides you with an idea of where to focus your security strategies. Knowing where your data is located and who has access to it will give you a foundation to build upon with other security tools and data protection strategies.
To guide your focus, try answering these questions:
- What sensitive data does my organization store, use, and transmit?
- Who has access to what data?
- Who controls database access?
- Is our data secure when it’s not in use?
- Is our data secure in transit?
- With which regulations and laws do we need to comply?
Also Read: Top 25 Data Protection Statistics That You Must Be Informed
2. Policies and procedures
It’s every employee’s responsibility to protect company data and prevent data theft. To help them do their part, create a transparent and explicit data security policy that holds everyone accountable for securing sensitive information.
Below are essential topics to cover in your policies and procedures:
- Data privacy: Make sure your employees understand the laws they must comply with when handling organization or customer data.
- Email usage: Train employees on ways to thwart social engineering tactics. Most cyber-attacks originate through email – in their Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon found that 32% of breaches involve phishing. And, at nearly 40%, email attachments were the top source of malware.
- Password protection: Using strong password protection for internal systems can help prevent breaches. Of confirmed data breaches, more than half involve weak, default, or stolen passwords.
- Mobile devices: Creating a mobile device policy that requires employees to use password protection and promotes secure usage mitigates risk and reduces the human attack surface.
3. Application monitoring
Once you have a clear understanding of where your most sensitive data is located, you should monitor who is accessing it and what they are doing with it. With the growth of cloud-based apps such as Salesforce, company data is easily accessible due to its position at the center of any business network. Defending against internal threats requires monitoring user activity and utilizing behavioral analytics that provides insights into the who, what, where, when, and why of your user’s actions.
Gaining visibility into your business-critical applications allows your security team to proactively detect, investigate, and isolate security incidents. Monitoring technology enables your organization to trust employees, but also verify that they’re not violating your acceptable use policies and putting your organization at risk.
4. Physical security
Although cyber security remains a pressing concern for most organizations, physical access to your network should not be ignored. When an employee departs your organization, cut off physical access immediately. Multi-layer authentication – requiring both a password and a physical token to gain access to technology and organization perimeters – provides an extra layer of physical security to your networks.
5. Sanctioning
To further protect the company and provide transparency for both new hires and existing employees to prevent employee data theft, an organization should have a well-defined sanctioning policy in place. In this policy, it’s essential to define specific penalties for those who do not adhere. Management should have a clear understanding as to what the implications are for employees who misuse organizational access. In your sanctioning policy, communicate to employees that their activity is being recorded through monitoring technology, and they will be held accountable for any misuse of the organization’s resources.
6. Culture and training
Employees are either the greatest vulnerability to an organization or the best line of defense. Implementing a culture of security and accountability secures your organization by making trustworthy behavior the default. The idea is to proactively prevent security issues as well as employee data theft rather than discovering problems after the damage is done.
While many organizations make the mistake of focusing on the headlines that highlight sophisticated external attackers, they overlook the real risk created by their trusted insiders. Certainly, there’s no foolproof strategy to solve the insider threat problem.
The truth is, nothing will eliminate the risk entirely. However, putting into place a handful of known best practices can greatly mitigate the danger of the trusted insider.
Also Read: https://cyfor.co.uk/employee-data-theft-and-the-application-of-digital-forensics/
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