There is an old saying that knowledge is power. In the age of smartphones, where everything is digital, data has become the equivalent of knowledge and power. The news is constantly filled with hacking, cyber criminals, identity and data theft and various other incidents. So why are bad things happening to good people? Or, from a business perspective, why are bad things constantly happening to good companies? To answer that question, let\u2019s take a look at the most likely causes of data loss.<\/p>\n
Although we live in the age of smartphones which are successfully helping employees to perform their job easier and that are dominating the workplace and personal lives, uncontrolled USB use can still pack a pretty good punch in the data loss prevention plan of a company. Data breaches caused by lost or stolen unencrypted USB storage devices are still among the top 3 reasons for such incidents worldwide.<\/p>\n
As the business environment and challenges are always changing, new cloud applications like file sharing, social media, and other collaboration tools are constantly being deployed throughout the organization. Speed and flexibility are the main reason for employees to use them without being sanctioned by IT departments, which find themselves in a constant battle to keep confidential file transfers under control and stop sensitive data from getting into the wrong hands.<\/p>\n
We might be talking about technology and smart devices but people are controlling them, fortunately (if technology ends up controlling us, we\u2019re doomed, but that\u2019s another discussion). Take for example the Snapchat breach. Someone pretending to be the company\u2019s CEO requests the employees\u2019 payroll information and rapidly receives it from an innocent, obedient employee who didn\u2019t identify the e-mail as a scam. Graham Cluley explains in detail what happened in one of his famous videos.<\/p>\n