Covid-19 Presents New Data Privacy Threats

The pandemic has created a host of labor, employment, and healthcare issues. Among these, the digitization of health records and increased frequency of employees working from home have created new cybersecurity issues that companies need to consider in 2021, according to a report released by Experian on Monday.

“This is a ‘cyberdemic’ era that we’re coming into because this is going to have long-term effects. We’re seeing new targets, and we’re going to have to have new methods to be able to protect ourselves,” Michael Bruemmer, vice president of consumer protection at Experian in Austin, said in an interview.

Bruemmer explained that he would expect to see personal devices getting hacked as employees work from home, contact tracing apps becoming compromised, and telehealth companies being targeted by cyberattacks moving into the new year. Bruemmer said that in 2020, telehealth breaches were up by 90 percent from 2019.

“For the last three or four years, healthcare records have always been the most valuable on the dark web,” Bruemmer explained.

Contact tracing will also present a cybersecurity threat to companies and government organizations as it becomes more widespread in 2021, Bruemmer said. He said hackers can clone the applications and go after individuals for medical information.

That motivates cybercriminals to go after employees in phishing scams to get them to hand over information. Often, cybercriminals will clone the email address of an executive or manager and ask for certain information.

See also:

• Remote Work Presents Risks to Proprietary Information
• Impostor Fraud: A Cyber Risk Management Challenge

“Of all of the breaches that we service, 80 percent of them have a root cause in some sort of human error,” Bruemmer explained.

Companies should focus on training and setting guidelines for employees as the number of cyberthreats increases, Bruemmer said.

“Where we have seen the best success in companies being able to reduce the number of breaches that they have, as well as the size of the breaches, is where it comes from the top down,” Bruemmer said.

He also explained that companies need both a carrot and a stick to motivate employees. “There needs to be the right motivation for people to do the right thing. … there are certain companies that will say, ‘if you violate a protocol, we’ll take action,’” Bruemmer said.

From: CorporateCounsel