Security Matters: Consider Email/Data Encryption (video)

At Verizon, securing confidential or sensitive information is one of our most important jobs. To make this topic a little more fun we recently developed a series of entertaining videos for our employees that contain messages about why Security Matters. We hope enjoy it.

We’ll launch one Security Matters video a week for the next six weeks on this blog. The topic of the first video is email security, so watch the action as our character “Michael” learns about the importance of encrypting email and taking simple steps to protect sensitive company information – and find out if he can “unsend” an email.

Every day there is a considerable amount of information that leaves the company electronically.

Much of this data may be confidential, proprietary, or sensitive information.

Examples of this type of data are:

Personal client/customer information - Names, SSN, Credit Card Numbers, etc.
Source Code
Business plans or marketing strategy documents or contracts

If it is necessary to transmit your company’s sensitive or confidential information outside the company, review the document(s) to ensure any unnecessary information has been removed before sending. These are some recommendation you and your employees can take when transmitting data:

Ensure you send to only authorized recipients
Ensure the data is reviewed and "scrubbed" as much as possible
Sensitive data must be sent in an encrypted attachment
Encrypted document passcodes should be sent through a separate communication than the original email, such as through a separate email communication or voicemail or other verbal communication to the recipient

Depending on the word or spreadsheet software you use there should be options for you to password protect the document.

While setting up and putting in place this security measure may seem to be more work, it could prevent confidential information from getting in the hands of unauthorized recipients and possibly save your job. This video shows how an employee inadvertently sent a confidential file to the wrong person – mistakes happen, but if you put in place the right measures, the consequences can be minimized.

Tell us how you ensure security with your employees.

[Editor’s note: Verizon offers email encryption and document encryption. To review the encryption solutions from Verizon click here.]