This post is sponsored by DeleteMe
Every day, there’s news of a new data breach, and even the most digitally secure companies can’t prevent their employees’ personal data from ending up with data brokers and bad actors because of a data breach at some third party website. The safest thing companies can do is to proactively make sure their workers’ information is removed from the web altogether.
“There are hundreds of sites online that sell access to our personal details,” Rachel Tobac, a white hat hacker and the CEO of SocialProof Security, said in an interview. “DeleteMe takes a lot of the hard work away from the individual and puts it on DeleteMe’s plate. They’re the ones that have to whack-a-mole this every single month for you.”
Tobac says any company that has a social presence online is one that should be using DeleteMe. She said people typically think the risk from cyber threats is lower than it actually is. “Even if you're a junior member of a company, the likelihood that you are targeted might be just as high as an executive because you are a frontline individual, and you're one of the people who's going to receive a phishing message first,” she said.
Companies typically train employees to spot phishing emails, but Tobac said she’s seen an increase in phone-based attacks. “Attackers are trying new attack methods like using AI-based tools to place phone calls and do voice clones, spoofing phone numbers and text messages to try and attack,” she said. “The ability to find your phone number and your email address are equally as important.”
Tobac said that bad actors brag about their exploits online. “They say, ‘I just go to LinkedIn, I find the new people that just started at the company. I click contact info and I get their email address and phone number there,” she said. “‘Or I just typed their name into Google with the words phone number and email address and boom, that popped up with data from a brokerage site within five to ten seconds.’”
If those emails and phone numbers are routinely scrubbed from data brokerage sites, bad actors never have a chance to use them. “Attackers are inherently lazy. Everyone is,” Tobac said. “People want to do the easiest thing possible, and if it’s annoying and hard to find the phone numbers and email addresses of your employees, they will simply move on to someone who is less annoying to find.”
DeleteMe makes employees’ information harder to find. “Everybody should be thinking about delisting themselves, especially if you are client or customer facing,” Tobac said. “The threat profile of a business that would want to use a delisting tool like DeleteMe is a business that interacts with human beings. If you've got customers, clients, vendors, internal employees, and people have received a phishing message in the past. And to be honest, that's going to be most companies.”
Delisting yourself or your employees from data brokerage sites manually is a time consuming and laborious task. “If you’ve ever been successful with taking your information down, you know it’s not a one and done. That is not how this works. Oftentimes they will put the information back up within weeks. You’ve got to have an organization that’s doing it for you,” Tobac said.
DeleteMe is an expert in getting information delisted. DeleteMe scans the internet and data broker databases for the sensitive information your company needs deleted, and makes sure it is taken down and stays down.
“DeleteMe is a tool I recommend so you can set it and forget it. Give them the details you want taken down, they take them down for you frequently and you don’t have to petition to remove them,” Tobac said. “Oftentimes you have to do a bunch of work. You gotta fax the data brokerage site. I don’t want to fax people. Let’s have DeleteMe take care of that for us and our employees.”
