How to Handle a Data Breach of Employee Information

Confidentiality remains to be a considerable part of corporate success. Keeping information about your clients and employees from third parties plays a massive role in protecting your interests and overall mandate over your organization.

Like any other healthy relationship, a trustworthy bond between the employees, employer, and clients is of the utmost importance when driving your business to the pinnacle of success.

Admittedly, in the past few years, many companies have faced data breaches.

For instance, in 2018, Facebook using the ‘View As’ feature lost about 50 million accounts to attackers before the data breach was dealt with.

One Amazon senior manager was also charged with the crime of inside trading once he was discovered to leak crucial company details to his family members.

The list goes on and on, including the attempted attacks on Tesla. The electric car manufacturing giant. Twitter also suffered a loss of employee information to hackers, who then gained access to the Twitter administrator’s tool. On that incident, only 130 famous profiles fell victim, but the attackers left with about $180,000.

And if you are an employer wondering how such issues can happen, keep reading to find out more.

How Can Employee Data Be Breached?

Most companies fall under the impression that they have taken enough cybersecurity measures to tackle any threat. But, no matter how much you safeguard your servers, increase access protocols, and put up firewalls for your data, you might miss a step. Below are some of the things you should look out for when determining a data breach:

1. Physical data breach

Maybe you thought that data breaches have to be done through technology. However, according to Verizon, about 4% of data breaches happen due to actual theft of devices and paperwork. And as employees are continually encouraged to work from home or on the go, then the risk of losing crucial information increases.

2. Unauthorized use

Employees should be the first to protect company information. However, they also pose a greater risk to data breaches than most employers think. For instance, data mishandling or getting crucial information accidentally could be risky.

And this accounts for about 8% of data breaches happening in organizations

3. Malware

Malware usually targets several aspects of your organization. For instance, the RAM scrapers invade your memory devices, where they scan for sensitive information. They are most common where cash is involved, as they can retrieve passwords and login details easily.

These two concerns tie for the second most common cause of data breaches. Fraudsters pretend to be other people and fish out crucial information. It could be via texts or phishing methods that could end up with personal data falling into the wrong hands.

Also, Verizon’s research shows that in about one in every five data breach cases, a human error occurred. It could be an email sent to the wrong person, handing over sensitive files to the wrong hands, or even leaving your server accessible online with no passwords.

At the top of the list is criminal hacking, which saw several medical companies lose essential information by the close of 2020.

So, How Do You Handle Data Breaches?

As illustrated earlier, there are multiple reasons why data breaches happen. But as an organization, how do you best handle such a situation?

Below are useful methods that have proven to work well when dealing with unauthorized access to sensitive company data, more so involving employees:

1. Stop the breach and assess the damage

If you have an overflowing sink, logic dictates that you first shut off the tap before finding a way to drain it. The same applies to data breaches. Once you notice that someone is siphoning crucial information from your organization, the first step should be to stop their access.

You can do so by isolating the breached section or shutting down the targeted department.

Next, find out just how much information has been lost and the consequent impacts. Find out:

What the breach targeted
How it was actualized
The nature of data lost
If the information is high risk or not
Also, find out if you can retrieve or block the data
Next, notify the affected parties

During a data breach, informing the affected parties helps you understand the nature of the risk you are exposed to. You should also notify the relevant authorities as soon as possible.

2. Perform a security audit

Many small businesses faced with data breaches are likely to go out of business when proper recovery measures are not implemented. That’s why you must conduct a security audit to determine where you were most affected and pinpoint any fixes you can implement to prevent similar incidences in the future.

3. Prepare

They say that once bitten, twice shy. It would be a shame to undergo the same situation twice. That is why you should employ the best countermeasures when recovering from a data breach. Update your security systems, protect your data, train your employees and get more robust access limitation guidelines,

Other methods of implementing protective measures include:

Limiting the number of people accessing sensitive information in your company
Implementing stronger passwords
Plus monitoring data transfer within your organization.

In case you find yourself in a fix involving a data breach case, you can always contact a professional legal representative to settle the matter.

For such data breach concerns, HKM Employment Attorneys in Indianapolis are at your service. Visit our website and find out more about employment data breaches and how to handle them legally.

About Author

Ben Gonzalez graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Law in 2013. Shortly after graduation, he worked as a paralegal until 2017, where he gained insightful knowledge used in his legal writing process.

Ben is currently a freelance lawyer and enjoys writing in his free time. He is a proud California resident located in San Francisco.

How to Handle a Data Breach of Employee Information