Workplace Identity Theft: Shredding

The following is an excerpt from John’s latest book Privacy Means Profit. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit our website www.ThinkLikeASpy.com.

For businesses, shredding is low-hanging fruit (one of the easiest sources of data breach to eliminate). But businesses are so often focused on electronic forms of data breach that they fail to heed the following statistics highlighted in a recent Ponemon Institute study conducted for the Alliance for Secure Business Information:

More than 50 percent of sensitive business data is still stored on paper documents.

Forty-nine percent of data breaches reported in the survey were the result of paper documents.

Sixty percent of businesses admitted that they didn’t provide the proper tools (e.g., shredders) to safely discard documents that were no longer needed.

The average data breach recovery cost according to this survey was $6.3 million.

If you own a business, make sure to destroy sensitive documents prior to discarding them, to decrease your legal liability. Businesses are required to destroy all consumer information before discarding it in the trash. The Fair & Accurate Credit Transaction Act (FACTA) Disposal Rule states that ‘‘any person who maintains or otherwise possesses consumer information for a business purpose’’ must properly destroy the information prior to disposal. FACTA further states that every person and/or business must take ‘‘reasonable measures’’ to protect against unauthorized access to the use of the information in connection with its disposal… Click Here to Continue.

Privacy Means Profit

Prevent Identity Theft and Secure You and Your Bottom Line

This book builds a bridge between good personal privacy habits (protect your wallet, online banking, trash, etc.) with the skills and motivation to protect workplace data (bulletproof your laptop, server, hiring policies, etc.).

In Privacy Means Profit, John Sileo demonstrates how to keep data theft from destroying your bottom line, both personally and professionally. In addition to sharing his gripping tale of losing $300,000 and his business to data breach, John writes about the risks posed by social media, travel theft, workplace identity theft, and how to keep it from happening to you and your business.

Posted by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention and tagged Document Shredders, Identity Theft Prevention, Privacy Means Profit, Shred, Shredding, Sileo, Workplace ID Theft.