Awareness Is the Key to Prevent Data Theft!
We are all aware of the blatant fact that our precious data nowadays is highly prone and vulnerable to malicious activities. The data stored is highly important as it contains those organizational secrets that act as a competitive advantage for the firm and thus maintain its market value and brand reputation. Therefore, it can certainly be said that the data stored is the life blood for the organization. Due to its high significance, companies take every possible measure so as to protect this extremely essential and critical information in all possible ways. The traditional methods of data security have now to a large extent have become obsolete as they pose certain restrictions and also require considerable time, effort and money. Therefore, organizations these days are looking into this malice of today€€s cyber world much more keenly and are willing to adopt every possible preventive technique so that they can protect their records from unauthorized access.
When we have a look at recent data theft cases, we come to know of the fact that despite some arduous measures, organizations have somewhat failed to prevent themselves from being a victim of this nuisance. For instance, we can take the example of HSBC Holding Inc. In 2011, the big British multinational bank became a prey of data breach and theft. As many as 15000 confidential accounts of its Swish Private Banking unit were compromised. The inquiry concluded that an employee of the bank, who was working in IT department, stole the records some two years ago. We can imagine the enormity of preventive procedures the bank must have had taken to ensure safety, but it all went in vain. According to a recent study, The Bureau of Justice noted that data theft incidents have cost Americans a staggering $10 billion in the past couple of years. The report also identified that about 84% of incidents involved some kind of hacking, privacy breach, stolen laptops and external hard drives and breaking in someone else€€s system to gain unauthorized access to their personal files and folders.
In the light of the above discussion, it can surely be said that organizations should invest much more resources and energy towards the effective prevention of their data. Data prevention is a very complex and typical process that involves several layers of security tactics and comprises of adding, removing and organizing action layers for the future as part of the company€€s risk management strategies. The soaring number of data theft incidents has alarmed companies worldwide with many of them actively and aggressively switching to new and reliable ways of data security. For this cause, businesses should first curtail and strictly restrict the access of third parties to the PCs that contain their sensitive records. Even unnecessary access should be denied to employees as well while only those employees having access that have direct link with that critical information. This is because insiders/company employees have also been found several times guilty of passing forward company€€s information to their competitors. Another useful technique is to encrypt all the files and folders that contain secret information. By doing this, files are encrypted in coded language, which is at majority of times, not accessible by hackers. Last but not the least, organizations must password protect folders in order to block unauthorized access. With this robust feature, critical files and folders can be locked and hidden by setting a strong password and therefore, in case of theft, the third part remains unable to break into the system to gain access.
When we have a look at recent data theft cases, we come to know of the fact that despite some arduous measures, organizations have somewhat failed to prevent themselves from being a victim of this nuisance. For instance, we can take the example of HSBC Holding Inc. In 2011, the big British multinational bank became a prey of data breach and theft. As many as 15000 confidential accounts of its Swish Private Banking unit were compromised. The inquiry concluded that an employee of the bank, who was working in IT department, stole the records some two years ago. We can imagine the enormity of preventive procedures the bank must have had taken to ensure safety, but it all went in vain. According to a recent study, The Bureau of Justice noted that data theft incidents have cost Americans a staggering $10 billion in the past couple of years. The report also identified that about 84% of incidents involved some kind of hacking, privacy breach, stolen laptops and external hard drives and breaking in someone else€€s system to gain unauthorized access to their personal files and folders.
In the light of the above discussion, it can surely be said that organizations should invest much more resources and energy towards the effective prevention of their data. Data prevention is a very complex and typical process that involves several layers of security tactics and comprises of adding, removing and organizing action layers for the future as part of the company€€s risk management strategies. The soaring number of data theft incidents has alarmed companies worldwide with many of them actively and aggressively switching to new and reliable ways of data security. For this cause, businesses should first curtail and strictly restrict the access of third parties to the PCs that contain their sensitive records. Even unnecessary access should be denied to employees as well while only those employees having access that have direct link with that critical information. This is because insiders/company employees have also been found several times guilty of passing forward company€€s information to their competitors. Another useful technique is to encrypt all the files and folders that contain secret information. By doing this, files are encrypted in coded language, which is at majority of times, not accessible by hackers. Last but not the least, organizations must password protect folders in order to block unauthorized access. With this robust feature, critical files and folders can be locked and hidden by setting a strong password and therefore, in case of theft, the third part remains unable to break into the system to gain access.