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Insiders and personal data fraud

Our passport data, payment details, home addresses and e-mail addresses, phone numbers are stored in databases of more than a dozen institutions, from bank to fitness centres, and hundreds of employees have access to them. How do they manage them? Real-life cases show that the data is not always used for legal purposes. However, if protection from intruders is a priority in any company, too often the control of their own employees is not a priority.

Sergey Ozhegov

A total digitalisation is a double-edged sword for business. Data processing, storage and transmission are the norm, but convenience makes it more accessible for fraudsters. The trading of customer and employee personal data is a topical issue for any business. But do all the organisations care about its protection diligently?

Health services

According to the Verizon's 2018 Protected Health Information Data Breach Report, 58% of all healthcare breaches are initiated by insiders. Judging by the cases we studied, this is not just numbers telling a story. Insiders are well aware of how to deal with medical data. Here are some real stories from our clients:

• An emergency physician used to provide a representative of a funeral service with information about the death of patients and their residential addresses. They communicated over WhatsApp, which was revealed to the security risk management department when the employee started to use the browser version of the app on the corporate computer. The correspondence made it clear that the data leakage process had been set going for quite a long time. The fraudsters did not discuss any terms of cooperation exchanging only specifics. The doctor was fined and reprimanded.

• A general physician at a private clinic provided patient data to the distributor of unlicensed drugs for a payoff. An investigation revealed that the specialist uploaded Excel tables with patient data to cloud storage, which third parties had access to.

• A laboratory assistant of a drug treatment clinic was given an unlimited access to the entire IT infrastructure by the chief medical officer. Later it turned out that the employee sent the information about drug addicts to various dealers. The dealers used social networks to connect with these clients. The case was forwarded to the police after the internal investigation.

These are not single cases. The demand for medical data among fraudsters is growing. On the dark web, the prices reach $1 000 per patient and up to $500 000 for electronic database.

Hospitality

As reported by the Trustwave, a large percentage of data leaks in a hotel industry are caused by insiders – 70%. Hotels suffer because of the specifics of staff hiring: a large number of seasonal and outsourced employees. In this situation, it is impossible to manage the situation with administrative measures such as rewards and punishments; an automated control system is needed.

In support of this, I provide a few more real-life examples from our customers:

• One of our clients revealed a fraudulent scheme with hotel check-in. A risk manager discovered the systematic sending of passport scans to external mail. An internal investigation revealed that the receptionist would sell them on specialised websites.

• Another client detected a sales manager who wanted to send passport scans to an accomplice for a reward. The employee transferred data stored in a shared network folder to a USB flash drive. The leakage of data to external device was revealed. As a result, the manager admitted that the passport data was meant to be used for identity verification on online casinos, as well as on retail websites.

The leakage of personal data causes reputational and financial losses. A high-profile incident occurred with Marriott, which exposed the data of 500 million guests. The company has incurred $28 million in expenses related to a large-scale data breach, according to the hotel chain’s earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2018.

The above-mentioned problems are common in the healthcare and hospitality industries. However, on closer examination, they are found in any company where personal data is processed.

There are a number of effective measures that will help any business to mitigate the risks of a personal data fraud:

• Reduce the amount of data. Collect and store only the necessary information about customers and employees. The easiest way to avoid leakage is to get rid of data that you no longer need.

• Train employees. Increasing staff awareness of the processing, storage, transfer and protection of data will help you to reduce the number of incidents and improve the overall quality of customer service.

• Identify and classify sensitive data. Each division of a company / organisation has specific tasks, which means that every department should have its own database. By separating data, you potentially devalue it on the dark web.

• Restrict access to databases. Access to customer / employee information should be limited to certain individuals. The less access rights employees have, the easier it is to detect an insider in case of a data leak.

• Specify data security requirements in contracts with employees and contractors. Signing documents that clearly state the responsibility for confidential data exposure will protect you from an intentional data leakage, or at least limit the potential consequences.

• Study legal requirements. Examine the requirements of local laws dealing with personal data and international laws of your industry regulators. A number of regulations have an extraterritorial effect and imply huge fines and sanctions, for example, GDPR.

• Use specialised IT tools. There are leak prevention solutions, the most effective systems for this task are DLP (data leak prevention) and EMS (employee monitoring software); DCAP and eDiscovery products will also be useful.

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