IT Services Company HCL Suffers Data-Leak, Quickly Recovers
HCL, a multibillion dollar company with over 100 000 employees, has suffered a data leak of sensitive customer and employee information. The leak was discovered on May 1st 2019 by a research team in UpGuard.
Information that was leaked included employee information, customer information, and company project details. For employees of the company, names, IDs, and contact information dating back to 2013 were leaked.
HCL has not been the only victim this year of data leaks. In April, UpGuard researchers also discovered that a configuration error by Facebook-partner Cultura Colectiva allowed 500 million user records to be publicly available for download. Leaked information included Facebook comments, account names and IDs.
In a 2019 report by Verizon, it was found that around 34% of data breaches were caused by individuals within the companies. A large part of this was caused by human error, such as CC’ing incorrect people in e-mails, accidentally publishing sensitive information online, or mistakes in network configurations.
The HCL data leak incident illustrates the importance of damage mitigation in the event of data leaks. The risk of data leaks will always be present, as there will always be the risk of human error. Therefore, it is equally as important to ensure that the protocols to minimize exposure are well-defined. UpGuard reported that within 48 hours, HCL was able to recover from the data leak and make the information private again. This was largely due to the fact that the contact information of the data protection officer was easily located.
GIGE Solutions helps design and manage your data privacy and IT infrastructure. Contact us at +1 888 366 4443 to get started with us today.