Business Identity Theft
If you own a business or work for a corporation, one of the many things you should be on the look out for is the ability to protect the identity of customers and employees. Many hackers and criminals have targeted businesses as their primary way to steal the personal information of hundreds, thousands or even millions of customers and employees.
Unfortunately as an individual you can not fully protect yourself from identity theft and fraud because many times it is not you that is targeted but the business databases that hold yours and thousands of others personal information. While for most companies, the security of customer and employee information is a top priority, in many instances, it can only take one person to lose or have their laptop stolen with personal information on it to compromise thousands or more people’s personal information.
While as a consumer your options are usually few and far between on protecting your information on a business’s computer, you can communicate with the business to determine if they take identity theft seriously. Some corporations have plans in place to notify their customers when identity files have been compromised.
If you work for a business where security must be adjusted to protect your clients, you might want to consider encrypting all your files that possess personal information, not allowing certain files on laptops, which can become lost and stolen and creating policies where your business can determine if personal files were hacked or compromised.
Top business sectors that are continually hacked are banks, credit card companies and financial institution such as brokerage houses and insurance companies.
It is also important that businesses that contract with third party service providers also have security features in place to prevent fraud and hacking. Many times, third party businesses are asked to perform data entry, database functions or other types of work on data that includes personal information, if you work for a business that seeks this kind of help, make sure that they have measures in place to reduce the risk of theft and fraud.
While many businesses usually keep quiet when a theft has occurred, this strategy can work against a business. New laws are being introduced to make sure that businesses that have experienced a breach of security or have been hacked notify their customers immediately so that customers can take appropriate action and protect themselves from fraud in the future.
