Protecting Your Company From Sophisticated Security Breaches
In July 2019, the Capital One breach compromised the personal data of more than 100 million customers. While virtually every well-known bank in America has faced a security breach in the past decade, this is one of the largest ever information security breaches in banking. What is worse is that Capital One only learned about the breach after the hacker reportedly bragged about it online. Even then, it was a GitHub user who saw it and alerted the company.
As companies fall prey to increasingly sophisticated security attacks, cybersecurity needs to remain a top priority, even for small businesses. Otherwise, client and customer information may become compromised, causing them to lose trust in the brand. For a company to stay ahead of hackers, it must focus on responsiveness. The key aspects of this are adapting quickly and filling in gaps in security.
Outsourcing Information Security
Whether a company is large or small, it has many items on its internal to-do list. Employees stay focused on quarterly earnings, keeping shareholders happy, and exceeding the expectations of customers. To ensure cybersecurity never takes a backseat to anything else, proactive executives outsource this function to a company that focuses specifically on this area. Here are some benefits a company may reap from taking this approach.
1. Tapping Into Tech Think-Tank
There is more to preventing information security breaches than just relying on a tech company to protect data. Executives may also need to educate consumers and employees on how to protect log-ins and spot suspicious behavior related to their credentials or use of their information. Even work processes can create vulnerabilities. Tapping into an external think-tank can help companies to better address these problems.
2. More Objective Audits
When you outsource to a third-party client, you benefit from more objective external reviews. Companies that conduct internal reviews may believe they do not need this. CNBC warns companies that employees are the greatest source of vulnerabilities. This includes the internal tech team. A third-party company is more immune to the “this is the way we’ve always done it” line of thinking.
3. Improve Agility in a Crisis
Forbes recommends prioritizing agility not just for information security, but also for financial reasons. The company that is most able to act swiftly in a crisis is the one that can secure not just a department’s worth of resources, but an entire company’s contributions. This allows the impacted company to focus on communications strategies and campaigns, while the third-party company handles filling the security gaps, conducting an internal investigation, and working with law enforcement agencies.
The Bottom Line
Trends in cybercrime show that hackers will only continue to become more sophisticated until laws catch up to them. Unfortunately, laws are taking a long time – and without tipsters like the GitHub user, some companies may never know customer’s personal information has been compromised.
Hancock and Poole Security, Inc. provides a wide range of services to support your information security planning, including help with regulatory compliance. Please contact us or call (866) 443-7841 for more information about how HPS can help prevent data breaches.
