Making news in recent days has been the Capital One data breach affecting 106 million people in the US and Canada. A former Capital One employee carried out the hack in March/April of 2019 and bragged about it online.
On July 17, 2019, an anonymous tipster contacted Capital One Incidence Response about the breach. Capital One launched an investigation and contacted the FBI. The accused was arrested on July 29, 2019.
Here's a good recap of what happened from KrebsOnSecurity. And here's the actual criminal complaint (which opens a 12-page PDF). Both are worth reading.
[Source: KrebsOnSecurity]
While we can't speak to the specifics of the Capital One data breach—or make the claim that our services would have alerted Capital One sooner—what we can say are the following two points. We invite all organizations to carefully consider them.
Pre-employment social media checks make sense, especially for organizations that store sensitive consumer data like SSNs, credit cards, and DOB.
Our social media background check solution has the ability to specifically look for hacking terminology (the types of phrases that the average person might not understand or recognize as being problematic). In addition, our powerful artificial intelligence (AI) scours the entire Internet, not only places like Facebook and Twitter.
Why does this matter? Well, think about it. If a job candidate has a history of using hacking terminology online, the hiring manager can be alerted before any job offer is made. Once again, it provides the hiring manager with better insights so that she or he can make better hiring decisions.
Ongoing social media monitoring of employees is also a sound strategy.
Why? As this case demonstrates, people do brag about criminal activity online.
Can social media monitoring stop or catch all bad actors? No. But if ongoing social media monitoring can mitigate the risk by even a small percentage, then this can go a long way in helping a company keep its data safe—and its customers' data safe.
At Good Egg, we encourage companies to embrace contemporary screening like pre-employment social media checks and ongoing social media monitoring.
We know this is a new area for many organizations. Our job is to guide you on the types/levels of monitoring that make sense for your business based on your industry, number of employees, job titles, and, of course, budget. Let us help. Request a demo today.
