It’s hard enough for businesses to cope with the additional administration caused by the COVID-19 pandemic without having to worry about an employee’s vaccine information getting into the wrong hands. But that is exactly the risk many companies are running by continuing to use email to send and receive sensitive personal information such as vaccination certificates.
Most organisations ask new hires and existing employees to email their vaccination certificates so these can be logged to ensure regulatory compliance. These documents may remain in the receiver’s inbox indefinitely, waiting on the day the email is compromised and its contents find their way into the hands of a threat actor.
Not only that, but companies may have procedures to check documents for viruses and this might include a free service such as VirusTotal.com which is owned by Google. Isn’t that a good thing, I hear you asking? Well, in principle, yes, but leading cybersecurity researcher, Dr Johanes Ulrich of the SANS Institute, confirmed on an episode of Cyberwire from approximately 18 mins and 20 seconds that VirusTotl.com makes information it gathers available to researchers and others. With the growing black market for vaccine test results and certificates, discussed on the ABC’s The World Today., this could mean the vaccination certificate or other confidential documents get into the hands of researchers and cyber criminals.
The good news is these administrative and cyber deficiencies can be easily overcome.
Rather than using email for sensitive information, you can invest in a secure file transfer solution such as SureDrop. This means your employees, and indeed clients, can confidently share their personal or sensitive information with you in the knowledge it is safe and secure.
Once you receive these documents you need to store them securely and, in a location, where it remains encrypted even if your organisation is breached. SureDrop offers the convenience and capability like other file sharing services. It is built with security from the ground up and considering data sovereignty. Hosting on Australian servers. Providing audit logs covering who downloaded or shared the documents. You can share a secure link to a folder for someone outside of your organisation to upload their confidential document without the need to email.
SureDrop has been designed to integrate with Votiro, giving you additional peace of mind that the document uploaded is 100% safe.
And to ensure your system is protected from viruses or malware embedded in documents such as PDFs, you can subscribe to Votiro a service that can eliminate 100% of any malware, known and unknown. It does so by pulling documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, images etc and reconstructs them with just the good parts. Providing you with working file without the concern of containing malware.
