According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, data breaches are up nearly 45% since 2018. And according to an IBM Security report, the average cost was $1.07 million higher in breaches. In the healthcare realm specifically, over 1.6 million individuals have already been victim to data breaches since Jan 1, 2017.
What can you do to prevent this disastrous event from hurting your customers and your brand? You need to consider both external threats and internal threats to the security and integrity of your data.
Protecting Against External Threats to Live Chat Security
256-bit SSL encryption is your core defense. Though there are other ways to compromise your data, it would take a hacker a million years (add 7 more million, so 10 followed by 56 zeroes) to brute-force their way through this encryption, even if they were using the fastest supercomputer available.
Server storage represents the other major defense against external threats to data security. There are two components to server security. Firstly, are the servers themselves – are they yours, your live chat providers, or a third party’s? What security measures are in place to protect the physical servers in addition to remote attempts to access them?
Even apart from your own concerns about security, this series of questions may be relevant for important data privacy regulations, e.g., electronic personal health information (ePHI) covered by HIPAA.
The second component to server security entails what data is stored and for how long the data is stored. Hackers cannot steal data that is not there. By default, Velaro saves chat transcripts in our own system for two years, then archives them for the life of your account with us. You can opt to save your transcripts to a different server or to turn off data storage entirely, as suits your storage and security needs.
Protecting Against Internal Threats to Live Chat Security
Unfortunately, threats to data security do not only come from outside your organization. There are four countermeasures live chat can offer to safeguard the security of your customers’ data against wrongful access.
Tiered permissions for chat, configuration, reports, etc. allow you to determine who can even access what data within the live chat platform.
An audit trail allows you to see the full extent of activity within your instance of live chat, meaning should something happen, you will have no problem identifying precisely when, using what account, and to what extent an issue occurred.
Data masking is an algorithm that scans what your customers type into chat and automatically obscures it from your chat agents if it is a credit card number, social security number, or whatever other sensitive information you designate. Not only will your chat agents be unable to see what was entered in the chat window, but it will be redacted in the saved chat transcript as well.
The sophistication of your password rules and the frequency with which you require live chat users to change them can also impact your risk level against internal threats to data security.
