Don’t ignore voice, text and video cyber risks

Secure Chorus Chairman Elisabetta Zaccaria recently addressed the London Society of Chartered Accountants on cyber risk, warning that voice, text and video technology was not receiving sufficient attention. Here she sets out her concerns.

August 2018

Accountancy firms hold, exchange, outsource and otherwise process a wealth of sensitive data with their business ecosystems, including clients, advisers and suppliers.

One of my main messages of the day was that a loss of financial data or other sensitive information, for example related to one or more client accounts, could adversely impact on a variety of services accountancy firms provide. This includes for example, audit and assurance, business recovery, forensic services, transaction and investment advisory and corporate finance.

Also, with the recent introduction of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), data breaches can result in fines of up to 4% of an organisation’s annual global turnover if the data relates to personal data of EU citizens.

I chose to talk about cyber risks to accountancy firms related to voice, text, video and other multimedia content over internet protocol (IP) networks. I believe that this area of data security hasn’t yet received sufficient attention.

There are three critical considerations for accountancy firms to weigh up when evaluating the digital multimedia communication technologies they plan to adopt. These are all related to making sure that solutions are interoperable, secure and regulatory compliant.

• First is to choose multimedia communications products that provide end-to-end encryption. This will ensure that any data processing activity can be done without compromising data security. 
• Second, accountancy firms should choose solutions that give them full control of the system security. This is important, as regulators will increasingly require access to an enterprise’s data. For example, ‘subject access requests’ under the EU GDPR. 
• Third on the list is interoperability, which allows different technology systems and software applications to communicate and exchange data.

Elisabetta Zaccaria is Chairman of Secure Chorus a not-for-profit, membership organisation, serving as a platform for private-public collaboration and development of forward looking strategies, common standards and tangible capabilities to provide a security baseline in the field of data security for the global digital economy.

For more information visit www.securechorus.org and follow the company on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

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