Protecting businesses’ systems from unauthorized access is of utmost importance to cybersecurity. Social engineering is the cause of 98% of successful cyber attacks. Social engineering attacks use the personal information of personnel to gain unauthorized access to systems through impersonation and phishing attacks.

Every member of an employer’s staff is a potential vulnerability whose personal information could be used to compromise their systems. And each one could have a personal digital footprint with hundreds of personal data exposures.

It is of vital importance to a business’s cybersecurity to reduce the number of attack vectors of their systems through the personal data of their personnel. Of particular importance is the personal information about personnel available online from data brokers, social media profiles, and other corporate data breaches.

The Problem

For every thousand employees a company has, each with an estimated digital footprint of 350 vulnerabilities there are potentially 350,000 copies exposed of their personnel’s data that could be used for social engineering attacks that could compromise their systems (per 1000 employees).

Removing each of these exposures manually for each individual is virtually impossible without technology. It would require all 1,000 personnel to spend weeks or longer trying to

1. track down all the places they gave their personal information to along with finding all the data brokers selling their personal info,

2. researching how to remove each exposure by reading each privacy policy, filling out the web form to delete their info, and then

3. follow up to verify that each one has been processed. Additionally, new exposures rise each month resulting in ongoing monitoring being required.

PrivacyHawk estimates that it would initially take 60 hours per person and then another 2 hours per month to manage this manually. For 1,000 personnel, that’s 84,000 hours of time per year spent manually reducing their digital footprints to reduce the risk of it being used for cyberattacks on their business systems. With an average cost of $70 per hour per employee, it would cost a company nearly $6 million per year per 1,000 employees to try to solve this problem manually without technology.

The Solution

PrivacyHawk uses robotic process automation and software to automate the above thousands of hours of work to reduce the digital footprint and number of social engineering attack vectors of the company as a whole. PrivacyHawk already has an existing, commercially available, working solution that can be used to help significantly reduce the number of personal data vulnerabilities that could be used to compromise a business’s systems.

This reduces the risk of data breaches and their associated costs, reduces the risk of IP theft and unauthorized access to company systems, and reduces the risk of social engineering hacks against the company. Ultimately that reduces the liability and cost risks of a data breach to the company and its insurers.