Information leaks, the threat faced by companies and professionals
Information leaks are already a fact that we read about daily in newspapers around the world. It is no longer just leaks within enterprises but individual information that people are worried about losing.
Large companies like Sony went through this last year and analysts estimated that the security glitch they had caused them a loss of more than 1,010 million euros. In this attack at least 25 million user accounts from various countries were exposed.
Some years ago in Spain one of the most important cases of data leaks occurred; in this case they were medical records. There were more than 11,300 records, 4,000 of them associated with abortions, leaked on the internet via Emule. The Data Protection Agency issued 150,000 euros fine to a medical center in Bilbao, and all of this was due to a simple employee error.
Another case where a large fine was imposed was at a law firm where an intern exposed client data and, due to his error, the companies’ reputation suffered seriously.
The Wikileaks website has already uncovered many instances of leaks of private information, the latest case being the leak of internal emails between employees of the Stratfor Private Investigation Agency. Some of the emails obtained by Wikileaks contain details about the methods used by the investigators to obtain information along with the email addresses of the authors and the recipients.
Just a few days ago millions of passwords were stolen from Linkedin and Last.Fm causing these firms to lose the good reputation they had built up to the incident.
Information leaks in companies are now at a peak, either due to employee errors, an employee taking revenge against being fired, or simply by a Trojan that was installed on and employees PC without them realizing it, and companies now understand how serious the consequences can be for their future.
Today it is essential for a professional or a business to protect their data against unpredictable occurrences like those we have seen and which are only a few examples of thousands of cases recorded so far, or not recorded, due to the companies not registering them in order to avoid damaging their image.
