The ability to work across multiple devices and ensure employees are connected helps increase employees’ productivity. Sometimes that productivity may come at a cost. The cost could be in the form of mobile data leakage, where your data accidentally lands in the wrong hands.
Financial companies are often torn between granting their employees convenience while at the same time maintaining security. Generally, security should never be traded for the need to achieve increased convenience and productivity. Any firm that seeks to observe text messaging compliance must apply proper security measures for employees who need to access data on their phones.
Keep reading to learn more about mobile data leakage, and how you can detect and mitigate it.
The threat of mobile data leakage?
Mobile data leakage happens when data gets transmitted from your organization to an external recipient without authorization. In the digital world, where almost everyone has access to smartphones, this transmission typically happens electronically. However, the term may also refer to its physical occurrence.
Employees remain the number one threat to your organization’s data, especially now that most of them are also communicating both inside and outside the corporate network on the same device.
Cybercriminals continue to better their tools and methods to steal data. However, as is often the case, it is the employees that eventually deliver this data to them.
Phishing, one of the most common strategies for stealing data, has gained tremendous success because it relies on people acting inappropriately and handing over data. It is worth noting that mobile data leakage does not necessarily need a cyber-attack. It often manifests as a result of an accidental activity or bad practices on how you manage your data.
Whereas data leakage may be merely embarrassing to some industries, in some sectors like finance, the impact has serious consequences. That is why SMS archiving regulations exist to mitigate mobile data leakage as much as possible.
The dangers of mobile data leakage
Not all mobile data leakage is the same. Data leakages that expose financial information are a bigger threat to your organization compared to those that reveal email addresses. Any leak that showcases personally identifiable information is extremely dangerous and can form an important basis for another wider attack.
Most data leaks stem from apps and mobile websites on smartphones that employees use to exchange corporate data. Typically, only a username and password is required to gain full control of the user’s online account.
The sensitive information that the organization risks leaking through its apps and mobile websites include: customer names, login credentials, gender, and birth, among others. A leak that reveals this information is enough for the attacker to gain total control of the account in question.
Ensuring that as much of the data as possible does not linger on mobile devices reduces how much information gets leaked. Deleting data is not the blanket solution because of FINRA retention requirements. Rather, mobile archiving is the viable solution.
Preventing mobile data leakage
The need to prevent mobile data leakage is of paramount importance in order to minimize risks, litigation and financial losses.
Below are several key steps that you can take to prevent mobile data leakage:
#1: Comply with industry text messaging compliance requirements
Industry regulators have put in place crucial compliance requirements that must be met. These regulations are not arbitrary and have been designed to also address data leakage. FINRA, for example was created in 2007 with the mandate of overseeing all firms in the securities business. FINRA retention requirements state that a regulated firm must preserve its records for a period of at least six years.
Generally, any firm fulfilling text messaging compliance is expected to be a step ahead in terms of preventing mobile data leakage.
#2: Have an internal mobile policy
Employees will not always be careful with the data on their mobile devices. As such, you need to be proactive and put in place measures that address how they access data and use it. Whether employees bring their own devices or are supplied with corporate devices, you need to implement a policy that secures company data.
The starting point is data classification, which identifies sensitive data and ensures restricted mobile access to it.
Other mobile policies that you must implement include:
- Multi-factor authentication – Has a two-layer authentication before an employee can access corporate data
- Limit app usage – Prevent employees from accessing apps that are deemed to be insecure
- Password management – Make it mandatory for employees to provide complex passwords before they can access data. Also, set regular password changing policy
- BYOD policy – Define a policy that controls how employees use their own devices in relation to corporate data access
As you create an internal mobile policy, it is vital that you align it with the overall policies regulating your industry. Engaging an expert can help you get it right with such a policy.
#3: Encryption and data wiping
Mobile phones get lost regularly. People carry these devices everywhere, meaning that they can easily misplace them or someone might take them. For this reason, you ought to have measures that safeguard data on devices.
Start by encrypting the mobile phone to ensure that a third party would be unable to access your data if it were lost.
You can also implement an Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) solution, which gives your IT team the ability to remotely clean phone data if it were to be lost. For the corporate devices, the IT department can restore the phone to factory settings, effectively performing a full wipe. A partial wipe can be done on personal devices to remove only corporate data.
As you converse about wiping data from the device, you need to be cognizant of industry data retention requirements. Having a text message archive solution can give you the confidence of clearing data from stolen devices because any information can be restored from an archive.
About TeleMessage
TeleMessage offers employees the freedom to use modern messaging applications on the mobile and desktop. Our mobile archiving products securely record content from mobile carriers and mobile devices, letting companies meet recordkeeping regulations and compliance requirements.
With multiple archiving solutions, you can always find the right tools or blend for your requirements:
- Network Archiver
- Enterprise Number Archiver
- Android Archiver
- WhatsApp Archiver
- WeChat Archiver
- Signal Archiver
- Telegram Archiver
TeleMessage offers cross-carrier and international mobile text & calls capture and archiving for corporate and BYOD phones. Visit our website at www.telemessage.com to learn more about our mobile archiving products.
