Who is letting your organisation down?

There have been a number of high profile data breaches by members of staff in organisations.

From the disgruntled Morrison's employee who leaked the salaries of staff onto the internet and was subsequently jailed for 8 years to the Tesco employee who was emailing details of customers to his personal email account and the Enterprise car rental employee who was selling customer information to a claims company, the main weaknesses in most organisations are the staff.

So what do you do about it? The cases shown above have been high profile and widely reported but organisations are probably suffering breaches on a regular basis and may not even be aware of them. We get used to what we see and do and so often we forgot to stand back and view the situation with fresh eyes. 

When I start to work with organisations, I am that fresh pair of eyes. I often also represent your clients. Are you collecting information to help you communicate effectively with them? We can easily identify the areas in your business where there is potential for losing your business information.

If you want to find out  more, we offer a free initial consultation so you can see how we would work with you. Contact us today to book a meeting.

Don’t leave your important information on the bus…

A school in York has been left red-faced after a member of the school staff left an unencrypted removable memory stick on public transport.

The Information Commissioners Office has launched an investigation after being made aware of the incident.  St Peter’s School in Clifton, which is one of York’s top public schools, admitted that there were a number of documents on the memory stick that related to school governance, and which could potentially include information about a ‘small number of individuals’ although thankfully there were no bank or financial details on the device. There was no suggestion that the information had been accessed or used by anyone since being lost in October.

The school's head, Leo Winkley, has also been forced to write to the parents of children at the school to inform them about the blunder, and is working with the ICO to make sure that all the correct procedures are followed - although it would have saved the school a great deal of trouble if they had simply encrypted their memory stick so that it was unusable without a password.

 

The loss has caused consternation in York as the device was said by a source to contain highly sensitive information about pupils and former pupils - and worryingly, the public transport operator has not been able to locate the missing memory stick - so nobody knows where it is, or whether it has been found by a member of the public and accessed.

A source told the York Press that they there had also been confusion with the ICO claiming to not know about the allegation, but after some investigation, subsequently confirmed that they were making enquiries into what had happened.

This case just underlines the necessity for all removable memory devices to be encrypted or password protected; with the best will in the world, memory sticks and other removable storage devices can go missing, but if the information is protected by a password, if it should be found by someone, the data will be protected from anyone unscrupulous using it.

Do you have a security policy in place and train your staff in how to protect sensitive information? If you’re unsure of how to protect your data, contact me and I will be delighted to provide you with guidance and advice.