By Azan Iwasaki, APAC Sales Manager.
It has been more than two years since the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) Scheme began legally requiring many Australian businesses to report data breaches. And, just as it was when the first NDB Scheme report came out, human error is a major cause of reported data breaches.
Human error breakdown
In the latest report, covering July-December 2019, the number of reported data breaches rose by 19%. Human error accounted for nearly a third of all breaches. And, of those breaches, sending personal information to the wrong person was the most common cause.
Other types of human error resulting in breaches were lost paperwork, not using the BCC field in email, and failing to redact.
What does this mean for Australian businesses?
The biggest takeaway here is that human error hasn’t become any less of a risk to Australian businesses that must comply with the NDB Scheme.
And, in a way, it isn’t surprising. Making an innocent mistake, like misaddressing an email, is all too easy to do. And no one is going to be able to work error-free, 100% of the time.
But making changes now can help financially and professionally in the long run. Businesses can help to protect staff by giving them the tools to work securely. Email recipient checking technology, like that in cleanDocs, can alert users to potential errors before an email is sent.
When the user clicks Send, it assesses the list of recipients for risk: i.e., external; public (Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! etc); or blacklisted domain names. The sender must either confirm the names as the intended recipients or take preventative action
The best form of defense is a good offense – don’t wait for a breach to happen before you think about your next steps.
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