Tag Archive for: “Identity Theft

Top 5 Reasons Corporations Educate Employees on Identity Theft

Why do corporations care (and spend money) to educate employees about protecting personal identity?

After all,  most businesses are profit-driven and only have time and resources to concentrate on initiatives that affect their bottom line. In effect, that is the answer to the question…

Businesses educate their employees and even their end customers on identity theft because it positively affects the corporation’s bottom line (by lowering the costs of data theft). Here’s how organizations benefit:

  1. Minimizing employee downtime. Serious individual cases of identity theft can take up to 600 hours in recovery time. Because banks and creditors are generally open when employees are at work, the employees are forced to recover on company time. Even if they only spend 40 hours during work recovering, this is a huge cost to the company. Roughly 10% of households will have to recover from identity theft at least once this year.
  2. Personal privacy leads to professional privacy. How can corporations expect employees to care about the sensitive information they handle every day (customer data, employee records, intellectual capital) if the employees don’t first respect their own private data? As employees discover how much their identity is worth, they are far more likely to protect the data they handle at work as if it were their own. After all, they begin to understand that next time it might be their identity that is stolen from a corporation.
  3. Corporate data breaches are expensive. Smart corporations understand that safe data is profitable data. Just ask TJX, a company that lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 94 million customer identities (far above what they initially reported) and could spend up to $1 billion recovering from the data breach. Not only are they being sued by customers, but by credit card companies and banks whose customer data has been compromised. Add to this the costs of providing a year’s worth of credit monitoring for every affected individual (a maximum of 94 million X $10 per month X 12 months), the damage it has done to their brand (almost everyone has seen this on the news), the hit taken by their stock and the thousands of hours spent in damage control, and you can see why investing in prevention is wildly inexpensive compared to recovering from a corporate data breach. And corporate prevention begins at the personal, employee level.
  4. Safe and happy employees are good employees. I have found that many corporations out there truly care about the quality of their employees’ lives. In addition, many of them hire me simply because they understand that safe and happy employees are more loyal to the corporation, speak well of the company, remain longer in the organization and drive more business. These companies consider their employees’ financial health to be as vital as their physical health, and it pays off over the long run. Identity theft poses the highest risk to their workers’ financial health.
  5. Educated customers cost less. I often speak to the end customers of corporations (e.g., the clients of a bank, the customers of a financial planner) who improve their security dramatically even when the just follow the basic recommendations in my ID Theft Tool Box. When a bank customer knows how to prevent identity theft, they are far less likely to become a victim and therefore less likely to lose money for which the bank is ultimately responsible. When someone steals your identity and drains your bank account, the bank generally covers the cost. If your identity is never stolen in the first place, neither your nor the bank has the expense.

If you feel that your organization would benefit from increased awareness about personal and workplace privacy, learn more about bringing in an Identity Theft and Social Networking Expert. You can also order you employees the Identity Theft Prevention and Recovery Workbook – All Privacy is Personal – Help them protect your company and your bottom line today!

 

John Sileo became one of America’s leading Social Networking Speakers & sought after Identity Theft Experts after he lost his business and more than $300,000 to identity theft and data breach. His clients include the Department of Defense, Pfizer and the FDIC. To learn more about having him speak at your next meeting or conference, contact him by email or on 800.258.8076.

Biometric Identity Theft: Stolen Fingerprints

Identity Theft is a huge and growing problem. According to the recent 2009 Identity Theft Fraud report by Javelin Strategy & Research, victims increased 22% in 2008 to 9.9 million. When businesses are involved, the companies face billions of dollars in theft, millions of dollars in fines and, perhaps most important, the loss of customer trust.

The large impact that identity theft has on individuals lives and corporations’ bottom lines has made inexpensive biometrics look attractive for authenticating employees, customers, citizens, students and any other people we want to recognize. The most recent debate is on whether the pros outweigh the cons. (To see some of the materials that influenced this article, please visit George Tillmann’s excellent article in Computerworld).

Biometrics uses physical characteristics, such as fingerprints, DNA, or retinal patterns to positively verify individuals. These biological identifiers are electronically converted to a string of ones and zeros and stored on file in the authenticator database.

The downside or weakness of biometrics is that the risk of data breach remains relatively the same. Just as a credit card number can be stolen, the numbers that make up your biometrics and are stored in a database can be stolen.  It may take longer for thieves to understand how to use these new pieces of information, but they will eventually be used.

Ultimately, this could be more dangerous than having your ATM PIN, credit card number, or Social Security Number stolen, and it will take longer to clear up.  In a worst-case-scenario, someone inside of the biometric database company could attach their fingerprint to your record — and suddenly they are you. The reverse is also true, where they put your fingerprint in their profile so that if they are convicted of a crime, the proof of criminality is attached to your finger.

What will stop thieves from electronically sending your stolen fingerprints to your bank to confirm that you really do want to clean out your bank account through an ATM in Islamabad? Fingerprints, when stored in a database, are nothing more than long strings of numbers. What will you do when your digitized fingerprints wind up on a government No-Fly list? If you think it takes forever to board a plane now, wait until every law enforcement agency in the free world has your fingerprints on file as a suspected thief or, worse, a terrorist.

The reality is that biometrics could be a great alternative to securing one’s identity – and they are quickly becoming a part of every day identification.  But we can’t go forward into the new world of biometrics thinking that it solves all of our problems. Like the “security codes” on the back of our credit cards, like the two forms of authentication required for most banks, like wireless encryption standards – thieves eventually find work-arounds. And so too will they work around biometrics. If we implement biometrics without doing our due diligence on protecting the identity, we are doomed to repeat history — and our thumbprint will become just another Social Security Number.

John Sileo became America’s leading Identity Theft Speaker & Expert after he lost his business and more than $300,000 to identity theft and data breach. His clients include the Department of Defense, Pfizer and the FDIC. Contact John directly on 800.258.8076.

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