Your responsibility to protect the business

It is the company’s responsibility to preserve shareholder value by protecting your brand, your IP and the value of your products. Among the threats your business faces, data loss risk must rank very high.

Trade secrets relating to each version of a product and new products, customer PII and market strategy are all valuable assets that need to be protected. Competitors can gain competitive advantage by launching a better product or launching earlier and stealing market share

Assuming you agree that your IP, in all its forms, represents a significant portion of your assets, then the only remaining question is how to protect these assets, without being overly intrusive on employee privacy and without creating a ‘big brother’ culture.

Privacy risks exist when surveillance systems are used by employees to spy on colleagues or to monitor outside their defined remit. Equally, intruding on the private lives of employees can lead to problematic HR situations, that can’t be “unknown”.

2019 Verizon Data Breach

The 2019 Verizon Data Breach report shows that email and insiders represent the greatest data loss risks. While firms saw a 67% increase in impersonation or business compromise attacks, over 56% of data breaches took months or longer to discover. That means that most firms don’t have good ways to detect that an email system has already been compromised!

The first question to ask: are your current solutions sufficient to protect these assets or are there vulnerabilities – is there a gap? How good are your defenses? and how well can you detect if you have already been compromised?

If an email account was compromised would you know? If an employee was colluding with or coerced by a competitor would you know? Are you able to identify data loss by a single email buried in the noise of daily email chatter?

Email remains the method by which the knowledge economy operates. In theory you should supervise your email – read it all.  That’s just not scalable given the millions of emails that cross your firewall every day.  Sampling and keyword searches have also proven to be ineffective.

Protecting Privacy and the business

So what are the options. You can either hire more humans to read a lot more email or you can use technology to do it. The value of using advanced technology like Catelas to look at every email is that no human ever sees the majority of the emails. In a sense there is no invasion of privacy. Only the 0.1% of emails that represent real risk are every presented to a human for assessment. Indeed risk is carefully defined, so ‘fishing expeditions’ are avoided.

Using humans to read everything or letting them decide, ad hoc, who and what to search for opens the process up for abuse and invasion of privacy. Whereas a technology like Catelas, once set up and operating under your own security policies and procedures, will operate independently and free from bias. The surveillance is not personal and humans get to see very few emails.

This is how many of the firms we work with look at the risk versus privacy challenge. Advanced technology provides better protection, is difficult to abuse and generates few alerts for humans to review. Humans are not suited to deal with such large volumes of email, their behavior harder to audit, and in the end they need to read too many emails to be effective.

HOLISTIC SURVEILLANCE: MULTIPLE ALGORITHMS WORKING TOGETHER