Desjardins, Capital One, Revenue Quebec, Hydro-Québec: these new measures to prevent the worst from happening again
In light of these recent events in these major financial groups, the leaders have decided to make decisions that could allow the establishment of a preventive procedure to prevent this kind of scourge in the future.
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It was, for example, the decision to ban the use of all removable storage such as USB or external hard drives within their business. "What we're putting in place is related to the whole context where there are more and more threats of data leaks (…) It's well-known enough in cybersecurity that USB sticks are a gateway often used," explains Louis-Olivier Batty, a member of the communications. Desjardins' home. It is remembered that the data theft The Canadian structure had been made possible by the use of USB sticks, which served offenders to store as much as possible personal information which facilitated the outcome of the case. "The data leakage in the financial industry is part of the overall context, but other issues also justify our decision to strengthen our policies and practices for protecting our IT systems and any company information, including personal information," Batty explained, referring in fact to "the risks associated with the intrusion of computer viruses."
At the Hydro-Québec level, the firm's 20,000 employees notified of the new measure that will be in effect. The information is passed in an internal newsletter where The Crown corporation took commitment to open up in the sense of 'securing all data, facilities and technological infrastructure (…) in and in the context of data exfiltration events Hydro-Québec has been implementing measures additional security" was explained in the bulletin.
And it should be noted that this has been in effect since now January 21, 2020. all USB stick or external disk is totally outlawed and likely to be sanctioned as a serious misconduct. However, the measure observes an exception. in Indeed, it may happen that, in an exceptional way, an employee has the right to use a external storage system, a privilege known as the "security exception." he it may soon be that other exceptions may be allowed for the facilitate data transmissions.
Apart from the prohibition on the use of physical external storages, the use of cloud devices such as Dropbox, Google Drive… Were also outlawed. In addition, it is strictly forbidden employees to respond to personal emails or open rooms attachments from their personal messaging services using terminals (desktops, tablets, or laptops) of the Crown corporation. However, these measures do not apply to all of the company's devices, mobile devices in particular. Indeed, the latter have already been equipped with the devices that allow: "to isolate corporate data personal data."
For Louis-Olivier Batty, these different safety measures have no negative impact on the profitability of the teams deployed by Hydro-Québec. So far, officials of the State-run company one have stated that they have received no complaints since the implementation of these restrictions. "Hydro-Québec is working very hard to ensure that what happened at Desjardins does not happen here. But we are most concerned about data servers being outsourced outside Hydro," said Mr. Cloutier, team leader at Hydro-Québec.
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