Business Fraud & Security Breach Prevention

• 40% of security breaches experiences by UK businesses are casued by simple human error.1
• 37% of breaches are caused by malicious attacks.2
• The average organisational cost of data breach to UK businesses is over £2.2 million is over £2.2 million.3
• One estimate puts global business losses due to identity theft at the equivalent of nearly £133 billion.4
• A 2014 government survey found that 81% of large and 60% of small organisations in the UK experienced a security breach last year.5

Every business needs a plan to protect confidential information

Every business needs a plan to protect confidential information. It’s likely you have sensitive information in your files that includes names, addresses, medical information, credit card and other account data. Unless you take steps to properly protect this information, you can open to the door to loss, identity theft and even criminal fraud. And today, it’s more than just a good business practice to protect sensitive data – it’s the law. A sound data security plan should include these five essential elements:

1. Take stock: Establish what types of confidential information your business holds.
2. Scale down: Keep only the information you need for your business. The Data Protection Act specifically dictates that personal information should only be gathered and used for legitimate purposes and should not be kept beyond it useful life.
3. Lock it up: Make sure information you hold is kept secure at all stages of its life, whether in electronic or hard copy.
4. Plan ahead: Create a plan in the event a security breach does happen. The ICO provides specific guidance on its website ico.org.uk.
5. Destroy it: The ICO recommends shredding confidential paper documents when no longer needed. Make sure you use a secure and documented shredding process conducted by security experts.

The ICO has published extensive information and guidance on information security and Data Protection on its website ico.org.uk.

Make Shred-it Your Partner Agaist Security Breaches

Big business or small, in any industry, one of the best moves you can make to protect your business is to work with a professional information destruction company. It’s important to make sure the paperwork, hard drives and other confidential materials you discard won’t find their way into fraudsters’ hands, and secure disposal of that information is key.

• Shred-it’s confidential destruction service offers a secure chain of custody for your documents and data, from the moment you place them in the secure console until they’re destroyed.
• As the world leader in information destruction, Shred-it’s security experts will help to keep your business compliant with your industry’s regulations, protect you against identity theft, and help you maintain your good reputation with customers.
• Shred-it uses industrial multi-edge cross-cut shredders so that your documents and data can never be reconstructed.

Take these additional steps to safeguards your business.
Heres what we advise our clients in order to guard against fraud and protect their reputations.

• Stay informed: Learn about current laws and legislation that impact your business, and how to stay compliant. Visit shredit.co.uk/resource-centre, for the latest legislation fact sheets, and sign up to receive automatic updates.
• Establish a security plan: Make sure you have formal security policies in place.
• Educate and enforce: Your employees need to know and follow your information security policies. Update employees on a regular basis and post your policy and guidelines around your workplace.
• Limit access: Only authorised personnel should handle confidential information.
• Create a retention policy: Determine which documents you must keep and for how long. Clearly mark a destruction date on all records in storage.
• Eliminate risk: Introduce a “shred-all” policy for ALL documents (confidential/sensitive and general) so that employees don’t have to decide what is – or isn’t – confidential.
• Partner with Shred-it: Our business is to make sure that no one knows yours.

When it comes to protecting your confidential information, the security experts at Shred-it can carry out a free Data Security Survey and risk assessment to help you put together the processes your workplace needs to keep information safe.

Over £6 million in fines issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office since 2010 – that’s the real impact on organisations for failing to protect confidential personal information.6

The fine, coupled with the significant damage to sales and reputation, could cause irreparable harm to a business and its future viability. Learn what to do to prevent security breaches from happening.

• Information security breach statistics
• Business fraud prevention tips
• Steps you can take to ensure data protection compliance
• 7 key steps to safeguard your business

1. Ponemon Institute LLC/IBM, 2014 Cost of a Data Breach UK
2. Ponemon Institute LLC/IBM, 2014 Cost of a Data Breach UK
3. Ponemon Institute LLC/IBM, 2014 Cost of a Data Breach UK
4. U.S. Small Business Administration 2013, How to Prevent and Detect Business Identity Theft
5. PWC, Department for Business Administration & Skills, 2014 Information Security Breaches Survey
6. ICO 2014, Enforcement/Fine