Data Breach Protection

Electronic data breaches have become an increasingly common occurrence these days. Criminals are working around the clock, using increasingly sophisticated methods, to find weaknesses in your organization’s security. Thankfully, there are ways to protect your most vital assets.

Protect your company from wire fraud

Wire fraud is a huge challenge for companies. In fact, it’s not uncommon for large companies to receive numerous calls and emails each week, attempting to initiate fraudulent wire transfers. If even one of these fraud attempts is successful, it can lead to significant losses.

When it comes to authenticating wire transfers, there’s no substitute for human involvement—specifically, good, old-fashioned client base knowledge. Wire transfers cannot be initiated without speaking to the client, so knowing a client and their voice, can significantly reduce the risk of fraud.

Financial institutions like Associated Bank work hard to understand you and your banking habits, to spot when something seems awry.

Be careful with email

No company, regardless of size, is immune from email compromise. This type of fraud happens multiple ways—through brute force hacking attempts, password leaks from unrelated data breaches and, most commonly, phishing scams.

As important as human involvement is in preventing wire transfer fraud, it can be a liability when it comes to phishing attempts. Fraudsters commonly target employees with emails made to look like legitimate communications. Often, these emails will ask the recipient to click a link and log into an unsecured website, where their login information is collected.

With their login information in hand, criminals can steal proprietary company information like client and financial records, gain access to important accounts and even install malicious software on web servers and company computers.

In this case, an ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure. Corporate training can go a long way in protecting email fraud. Employees should know how to verify the legitimacy of an email before clicking on links, responding or opening attachments.

Storms in your cloud

One form of technology that’s emerged in recent years is cloud-based storage systems. These are great for freeing up space on devices, but they also present challenges when it comes to protection.

For starters, the cost to protect data in the cloud is high. Companies need to continually invest in the newest security technology to ensure data safety, and that cutting-edge technology can be expensive to purchase and implement.

Further complicating matters, cloud data needs to be secured on both the cloud servers and individual user devices. This can make things more difficult, especially when it comes to lost or stolen smartphones and laptops. It’s important to have either data erasing solutions that can scrub device content remotely or login revocation procedures to disable access.

Thankfully, the benefits of the cloud vastly outweigh the potential downsides. The cloud gives employees immediate access to their most important documents and records, while giving employers the ability to deploy changes quickly and efficiently. In an increasingly remote-work world, the productivity cost savings can offset the cost of enhanced security measures.

Stay vigilant

Modern technology has made accessing data and conducting financial transactions easier than ever. But that convenience should be paired with vigilance, both on a personal and corporate level.

Investing the time and money into employee training, as well as the newest security technology can help protect your company from costly data breaches.

Learn more about the most common types of fraud.