Whenever a firm is partnering or contracting with a third party to handle and process key customer data, it is essential for these third parties to use effective strategies to protect data. Third parties should always look forward to treating the data they are handling from companies as their own while adhering to the regulations and the security needs that the company sets.
If your company offers services involving the handling of key data, continue through our post to garner the best information and strategies you emphasize for the security and safety through managed third party risk.
Common Ways Third Parties Misuse Data
Misusing data or information systems at the company would lead to compromised data. As reported by Verizon, 15% of the data breaches involved third party vendors or suppliers.
Unauthorized Data Sharing: One of the most common ways third parties misuse data is by sharing it without appropriate authorization. This happens whenever companies need to have stringent control over the individuals having access to data or ensure that the third parties follow the same standards of privacy. The unauthorized sharing of data leads to personal data being disseminated more than what is intended.
Data Monetization: Third parties often start monetizing data by trading it with other businesses. The practice involves bundling data into bigger sets and selling them to marketing firms, advertisers, and other entities who are keen to target distinctive demographics. The real data owner might have offered consent for effective data collection; however, it is never for sale to profit.
Identity Theft and Fraud: Sensitive data like financial details, social security numbers, or personal identification details fall into malicious hands as it leads to identity scams and theft. Third parties will never secure the proper data, thereby exposing it to cyber threats who then use it for opening these scam accounts or for making unauthorized transactions.
How to Prevent Data Misuse
Every business has its own set of complexities, which must be addressed whenever matters revolve around data security. Let us share a couple of best practices that you can implement in your workplace to prevent data misuse.
Implement Identity & Access Management
Verification of the user identity of whoever tries accessing your system is an important approach for safeguarding your data. Data comes in any form, like information about your customers and company. Using MFA or multi-factor authentication to ensure that only reliable users can gain access to data.
MFA secures the process of authentication that needs a few credentials like a notification on their smartphone or biometric data for verifying the identities. Access management is specifically essential for every account holder to have extensive access to sensitive and valuable company data, as privileged accounts would require an additional layer of protection against insider misuse and cyber attacks.
Establish Need-To-Know Access
For the detection and prevention of misuse of data, you have to check whatever is happening whenever a user is accessing the data or the file. Activity logs enable you to contextualize and track every action taking place under your network.
You can implement activity monitoring solutions complementing logs and help security by constantly observing when and how every user is interacting with data. The thoroughly informed user view on activities helps the admins to precisely determine whether the user actions impose a harmful intent or threaten the confidentiality of every data.
Set Up Behavior Alerts & Analytics
Keeping the workforce under constant monitoring is a tough job, specifically across bigger companies. Look for better solutions like IT innovations for small businesses that come with notification features that will alert security whenever data gets compromised.
You can start customizing the alerts on the distinctive behaviors as you should consider the new logins onto the server and run a few specific applications or external devices and drives that connect the infrastructure. Real-time analytics are the key to stopping the misuse of data whenever it happens.
UEBA or User entity behaviors analytic modules would evaluate the user actions while determining the regular activities for every account holder. Whenever the employees are performing anything suspicious, like gaining access to the data and files they hardly used earlier will raise an alert to the security.
Educate Your Teams
Keep your employees updated on data security, which would eventually prevent any accidental misuse or leaks. It is essential to outline the policies on the data processes and standards in the convenient company resources.
The initiatives towards regular training on data security will help raise awareness. Cybersecurity training courses and sessions involving knowledge-sharing from the security team promote better data practices from retaining the confidentiality of the credentials in terms of identifying the latest phishing scams.
Build Clear Processes Around Data Access
Customers always need to ensure their data safety; however, they would also like to use your apps and services without any difficulty. Offering a secure and seamless customer experience indicates building identity and access management into the tools of the customers.
Check out the features such as account takeover protection, integrated sign-ons for apps and social media channels, as well as MFA to retain the security of the customer data without any cost of use.
Minimal Access Privileges to System Users
Never risk any probability of data breaches through systems if your third-party company does not require access to the key data. So, keep them from accessing. However, when a third party requires higher access to security, assess the amount of data they would require and safeguard your data through due diligence or constant monitoring.
Conclusion
Misusing data by third parties often presents notable risks to both people and companies. Knowledge about the way data is often misused, the risks associated and the approaches that can be undertaken for prevention of data misused to safeguard privacy is through robust data security.