It’s essential to protect your company’s communications. Without the proper security measures in place, hackers can easily breach email, messaging, voice calls, and video communications. Malicious actors can access the content of all of your communications and use that access to further infiltrate the valuable data stored on your network.
To guard against such hacks, you need to ensure that all of your internal and external communications are completely secure.
Why Secure Communication is Essential
Your employees’ calls and messages often contain sensitive information that you wouldn’t want leaked to the outside world. In addition, if hackers can intercept a communication, they will then have an inroad to your entire system and all of the data contained therein.
There are seven essential features that your communications platform needs to include. Keep reading to learn about these features, without which you’re only partially protected.
1. Secure Authentication
Secure authentication is essential to protect your company’s communications. This means requiring longer and more complex passwords, as well as encouraging employees to change their passwords regularly. In addition, you should consider implementing multifactor authorization (MFA) to insert an additional layer of security into the authentication process.
2. Least Privileged Access
It’s not necessary – in fact, it’s quite risky – to allow all employees access to all communications and data on your network. It’s much safer to limit access to only those employees that really need it, regardless of their title or level within the organization. Employing least privileged access keeps unnecessary risk to a minimum. Employees essentially gain access to communications and data on a need-to-know basis. Fewer eyes on any given piece of data reduces the risk of that data being stolen or attacked.
3. Ephemerality
Not all communications need to be stored indefinitely — in fact, keeping them often poses a considerable security risk. If someone does breach your system and can access all past communications, you have provided them with a massive amount of information that they can use to compromise your organization further. Employing ephemerality — deleting communications after a set amount of time — keeps your organization more secure by purging unnecessary data. After all, the best defense is having nothing that requires defending, or at least limiting it significantly.
4. End-to-End Encryption
Encrypting data stored in your system effectively mitigates the damage if that data is breached. This principle still applies to your company communications – encrypting all communications keeps malicious actors from listening in and accessing your data.
The most secure approach is to employ end-to-end encryption, which encrypts all communications from start to finish. This ensures that all communications are indecipherable, even if intercepted. End-to-end encryption should be utilized for all communication methods, including text, voice, and video.
5. Fraud Detection and Prevention
According to the FBI, phishing is the most common type of cybercrime, and most phishing attacks start with a fraudulent email message. For this reason alone, it’s essential that your communications platform includes fraud detection and prevention. Your system needs to be able to identify and block phishing, spear phishing, and other fraudulent emails sent to your employees. This may involve specific anti-phishing tools, geolocation and address verification protocols, and blacklisting/whitelisting capabilities. The goal is to keep your employees from being tricked by fraudulent messaging.
6. Compliance with Data Regulations
Strong security is essential for protecting your company’s communications and data, and it’s also required by many industry and government privacy regulations. Failure to comply with these regulations not only puts your organization’s data and communications at risk, but it also could make you liable for some hefty fines. Know what’s required of you and comply with those standards.
7. Network Security
According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2020 reached $3.86 million. Many of these breaches happened because of insecure communications – employees using unprotected Wi-Fi networks, mobile phones and other personal devices, and public video conferencing meetings. While all of these communication methods can be better protected through various means, the ultimate stopgap is installing strong network security. You need to employ a full range of security tools to protect your network from data breaches, ransomware, malware attacks, and other malicious actions. No matter what else you do, it’s that added layer of security at the network level that really matters.
Use Wickr for Enhanced Communication Security
Wickr is the most secure communications platform available today. Through the use of industry-leading end-to-end encryption, Wickr ensures that communications of all types – text, voice, and video – remain secure, even in transit. Wickr also employs a unique “burn on read” technology that automatically deletes messages after being received, so there’s nothing stored for hackers to breach. Contact us to learn more about how Wickr can help improve your organization’s communication security.
Contact us today for more information about Wickr’s secure communications platform.