How Much Sensitive Information Are You Leaking?
How Much Sensitive Information Are You Leaking?
Month Date, 2007: Data Leakage is a major problem for businesses, particularly if highly sensitive information were to find its way into the hands of the media or competitors.
Data leakage refers to sensitive documents or information ‘leaking’ out of your internal business and into the public domain. This can be extremely devastating for an organisation, particularly if fiendish journalists or greedy competitors were to get a hold of them.
Research by Consumer Information group, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has shown that 68 percent of organizations are experiencing six losses of sensitive data annually, while 20 percent are suffering 22 or more sensitive data losses per year. This has lead to over 160 million recorded data breaches which leaked sensitive information since 2005.
“This is a staggering figure, when you consider that even one such leak is a big deal”says Armagan Cetindas from Symantec.
One of the biggest culprits is actually mobile media, such as laptops, flash drives and disks. It may seem perfectly natural to have a USB flash drive on your keychain that has all of those documents you need, but how often have you lost your keys or misplaced a flash drive. While it sounds like a mild nuisance, if you happen to lose customer details, the consequences can be dire.
“Organisations can face a revenue loss of up to 8%, which is disastrous for just one single leakage” Cetindas explained.
Organisations can prevent data leakage in a variety of ways, including software based solutions and monitoring, though the simplest method is simply to train your staff to be aware of the dangers. Carrying sensitive information on portable devices can easily be avoided, as can simple things like turning auto complete off in your email client so you don’t inadvertently send the latest product ideas to john the journalist instead of john the product guy.
“Australia faces an intense danger from data leakage due to our fast take up of technology as we adapt to it quickly. Looking at USB flash drives, Australia has more per person then most western countries.”