A third party contractor’s worker has been dismissed by the oil company Shell under suspicion of misusing employee data. The company learned that employee could have filed fraudulent unemployment claims by stealing four of its employees’ social-security numbers as he was engaged in database work. Hence, the employee was removed from Shell premises.
With the following incident, Shell also terminated its contract with the third-party vendor. The company had no information if any credit card fraud had been committed or if any employee personal data had been compromised. In an employee notification of the incident, Shell said that to investigate this matter it will continue to work with the law enforcement agencies.
According to Andy Buss who is a security analyst from the firm Canalys, nothing can be done to get rid of all the bad apples. He added, to monitor the flow of information over networks, companies should have data-loss prevention or intrusion-detection capabilities. Only company issued encrypted sticks should be used and the use of removable storage devices such as USB sticks should not be encouraged.
Companies all over the world are countering the problems of data loss and data storage. Online backup and online data storage are excellent solutions to these problems.
