Accidental disclosure is one of the most common causes of data breaches. With global focus on data protection rising as fines related to GDPR in the EU run into tens of millions of Euro, quantifying the exact causes of data breaches is critical.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has published analysis of the Australian statistics since the Notifiable Data Breach Scheme was established last year, finding that the single most common cause of a data breach is personal information emailed to the wrong recipient.
In fact, approximately a third of all data breaches caused by human error involve email transmission. The type of data breach which impacts on the highest number of individuals is a failure to use BCC when sending an email to numerous people, which accounts for 8% human error breaches.
The problem lies in the exposure created for an organization when a user sends an email to numerous external parties and inadvertently hits ‘send’ with the entire addressee list in the ‘to’ and/or ‘cc’ fields. The best practice for privacy management is to write all addressee emails into the ‘bcc’ field. However, people are busy, they’re often multi-tasking, they forget best practices and there can be considerable pressure to hit ‘send’ and get a mass email out to an external audience. Inevitably, mistakes happen. And those errors are usually time consuming and expensive to resolve.
Recognising the need for additional support in managing personal data to adhere to privacy legislation, Janusnet has added a standard process to Janusgate Exchange to automatically address the problem of unauthorised disclosure after the transmission of an email from a PC, webmail or phone. The new automated functionality in Janusgate Exchange ensures your teams will never inadvertently disclose email addresses in a ‘cc’ or ‘to’ list ever again.
Using configurable rules, Janusgate Exchange monitors a message after it leaves the user’s email application. Janusgate Exchange can act upon messages that meet certain, configured conditions. When those conditions are met, actions to modify the message can be taken. In this instance email addressees are automatically moved to the ‘bcc’ field if Janusgate Exchange detects a message with a certain number of addresses in the ‘to’ and/or ‘cc’ field and that the message is going outside the organization.
Fast and simple to deploy, this solution is available now to give your organization a privacy management safety net. You might have questions - so please contact us.
