Assess Your Vulnerability During Data Privacy Week

Not everyone gets as excited about National Data Privacy Week as we do at INKY. We understand that. The truth is, the world would be a better place if cybercrime and data breaches didn’t exist at all. And yet, they do — to the tune of $4.24 million, which is the average cost of a data breach these days.¹

If your business could not easily sustain that type of a hit, now would be a great time to get your company involved in Data Privacy Week by educating yourself and your staff, assessing your company’s vulnerabilities, and putting a plan in place to prevent potential data breach disasters.

About Data Privacy Week

Data Privacy Week is an expansion of Data Privacy Day, which began in the U.S. and Canada in 2008 to commemorate the signing of Convention 108 – which was the first legally binding international treaty dealing with the processing of personal data. Today, the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) promotes the goals of data privacy by sponsoring a week-long effort to educate individuals and organizations on the topic of keeping data secure.

What the National Cyber Alliance Asks of Businesses

During National Data Privacy Week (and all year long, for that matter) the NCA encourages businesses to respect data and be more transparent about how they collect and use customer data. Here are a few of their main recommendations:²

• Conduct an Assessment: Conduct an assessment of your data collection practices. Follow reasonable security measures to keep individuals’ personal information safe from inappropriate and unauthorized access and make sure the personal data you collect is processed in a fair manner and only collected for relevant and legitimate purposes. Don’t forget to maintain oversight of partners and vendors as well.
• Adopt a privacy framework: Researching and adopting a privacy framework can help you manage risk and create a culture of privacy in your organization by building privacy into your business. The NCA has examples of such frameworks on their website.
• Educate employees: Create a culture of privacy in your organization by educating your employees of their and your organization’s obligations to protecting personal information.

Protecting Your Company from a Data Breach

If you’ve ever wondered what goes into calculating the cost of a data breach, there are typically four main cost categories that equate to the overall expense.¹

• Detection and escalation (29%)
• Notification (6%)
• Post-breach response (27%)
• Lost business cost (38%)

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, there are also 10 common initial attack vectors (think of them as paths or entryways) that set a data breach in motion. In 2021, the two most costly were Business Email Compromise (BEC) and email phishing.¹  On the Top 10 list that can begin with a deceptive email include social engineering and compromised credentials. Not only are these attack vectors expensive, but they are also painfully difficult to identify and contain.¹

Combat and Prevent Data Breaches with a Proactive Email Security Solution

The most important step you can take during National Data Protection Week to prevent a data breach is securing the services of a third-party email security expert.

INKY helps companies secure email using a cloud-based security platform that proactively and instantly scans inbound, internal, and outbound emails to eliminate phishing and malware. INKY’s in-line positioning (between the email transport engine and the back-end cloud mail store) allows it to examine email before it reaches a recipient’s inbox. INKY's patented technology detects and blocks brand forgery attempts using computer vision and machine learning models, and mitigates sender impersonation attacks using social profiling and stylometry algorithms.

To help employees make safer decisions regarding email security, INKY’s Email Assistant flags each email with a message banner that alerts the reader to any potential danger. This simple, yet effective ‘assist’ provides specific details which continually educate and train employees on security risks. Your staff also has the option of using a “Report This Email” link in order to communicate or confirm the status of phishing emails. That information goes straight to INKY’s head, making it even smarter.

INKY is a 2022 Data Privacy Week Champion and we encourage you to champion the security of your company’s data this week by taking a step that will keep your company safe from data breaches, ransomware, and phishing attacks all year long. See what INKY can do for you by scheduling a free demonstration today.

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INKY is an award-winning, cloud-based email security solution developed to proactively eliminate phishing emails and malware while simultaneously providing real-time assistance to employees handling suspicious emails so they can make safer decisions. INKY’s patented technology incorporates sophisticated computer vision, machine learning models, social profiling, and stylometry algorithms to effectively sanitize emails, rewrite malicious links, detect and block security threats, mitigate sender impersonation, and more. Cost-effective and powerful, the INKY platform was developed for mobile-first IT organizations and works seamlessly on any device, operating system, and mail client. Learn more about INKY™ or request an online demonstration today.

¹Source: https://www.ibm.com/security/data-breach

²Source: https://staysafeonline.org/data-privacy-week/about-dpw/