Protect Yourself Against the Threat of Information Leaks

 

Email is well-established as a prime means of communication for business purposes that is quicker and cheaper than more traditional methods. Yet it brings with it the necessity to make corporate messaging secure and manageable.

 

Email is used for communicating sensitive information, corporate intellectual property and transferring sensitive documents. WITHOUT CONTROL:  Employees frequently send sensitive information and documents unprotected across the internet to coworkers and business partners.  

 

An added risk is the email sitting unprotected on a company's servers or an employee's workstation where it can be viewed or accessed by unauthorized individuals.   While many email programs have security features built in, they are not commonly used due to maintenance requirements and their complexity.

The growth of the Internet has provided unprecedented opportunities for interaction and the sharing of data between corporations, their partners and their customers. However, until recently these advantages have come with a great element of risk to the integrity of this information. Since confidentiality has been at risk during email communications, the Federal Government has mandated that all publicly traded companies must keep all electronic transactions secure.

Secure2Send satisfies these tough security standards for electronic data interchange; during its transmission and while in storage and is ideal for e-Statements and e-Bills.

The threat of emails containing malicious or offensive content

Emails carrying sensitive information, or unsolicited mail messages sent out by corporate users are not the only problem a company has to tackle with regard to employees' email use. Emails sent by staff containing racist, sexist or other offensive material could prove equally troublesome, not to mention embarrassing - and expensive!

This factor hit the headlines during the much-publicized antitrust case against Microsoft Corp., when the US government presented as evidence the contents of emails written by top Microsoft executives describing plans to topple competitors. On a similar note, Chevron recently had to pay $2.2 million to settle a lawsuit resulting from an email message bearing sexist contents.

 

Protect yourself against the threat of information leaks.

Organizations often fail to acknowledge that there is a greater risk of crucial data being stolen from within the company rather than from outside.

Various studies have shown how employees use email to send out confidential corporate information. Be it because they are disgruntled and revengeful, or because they fail to realize the potentially harmful impact of such a practice, employees use email to share sensitive data that was officially intended to remain in-house.

FBI statistics, for example, reveal that among Fortune 500 companies, most data thefts in 1998 were by internal users. Again, research results carried in PC Week in March 1999 report that, out of 800 workers surveyed, 21-31% admitted to sending confidential information - like financial or product data - to recipients outside the company by email. Ten per cent of those surveyed disclosed that they had received email containing company-confidential information.