Hackers and their growing potential power over your data are the talk of the town in early 2015. After the infamous Sony and celebrity hacks last year, not to mention the declaration of war against jihadists by the international hacker network Anonymous, hackers seem to be gaining political and corporate power rapidly.
But data security is about more than just protecting your data from outside hacks. A recent data security breach illustrates an alternative source of danger for your company: your own employees.
What Happened
In December, financial services broker Morgan Stanley found the confidential data of 900 of its wealthy clients hit the internet. After an internal investigation, the company found that the culprit was not an external hacker, but one of its own brokers. Allegedly having stolen the data of no less than 350,000 clients, the broker was looking for a buyer online when he got caught.
What it Means for Data Security
The case of Morgan Stanley offers a valuable lesson in data security. Potential breaches can come from within just as easily – if not even more easily – than from outsiders. Many companies don’t protect their data nearly as well from internal culprits, leaving it vulnerable for just these types of cases. So what can you do?
InvestmentNews.com cites security expert Gary Davis, Jr. for a potential solution: creating a detailed security plan that restricts client and financial data only to employees who need to access them. That’s a great start; however, it doesn’t account for the possibility of recovering seemingly destroyed hard drives with sensitive for data breaches. Employees often have access to these “destroyed” hard drives, so what do you do?
A great solution would be to invest in a hard drive crusher. It’s the only way to ensure that your hard drive is truly destroyed and is safe from a data security breach. Contact us to learn more about how hard drive crushers can prevent your employees from stealing your data!
