Seven common mistakes of identity theft protection
To protect your organization’s employees and clients, you need to evaluate how well your company protects its PII. Here are seven common mistakes to avoid.
Keep users in the dark
If your users don’t know how to identify and handle PII, it’s only a matter of time before one of them discloses this data to the wrong source.
Partner with the wrong businesses
If your company collects and shares PII with insecure partners, who do you think will end up in the paper and explaining to law enforcement about how a breach occurred? Your company will.
Keep data around past its prime
What do you do with data once it’s served its purpose? If you aren’t destroying PII when it’s no longer required, then you’re not doing your job. That doesn’t mean throwing it away either — that means destroying it.
Don’t worry about physical security
It’s imperative that you implement physical access controls to prevent unauthorized people — including employees — from gaining access to PII. Get a door lock and a badge reader, and start controlling access.
Don’t lock up your records
If you don’t have specific storage areas on your network (as well as file cabinets) for PII, then how can your properly protect it?
Ignore activity on your network
If you’re not going to actively monitor your network for suspicious activity or incidents, then stop collecting the data. Develop a method that’s within your capabilities and budget to monitor your network for suspicious activity or incidents. And while you’re at it, develop a response and mitigation strategy for security incidents.
Audits? Who needs audits?
A lot of businesses either don’t know what security events to audit or don’t read their security logs — or both. If you’re not sure which events to audit, find out. Set up security auditing, and start reviewing your logs today.
From the article by Mike Mullins.
This blog is run by the authors of FindProtected.
FindProtected is a security program that allows you to search for password protected files. With FindProtected, you can effectively identify protected files containing sensitive data on your network.