The case for customer education . . .
The fact is, when two customers walk into your establishment, one is probably being attacked RIGHT NOW!
The results of a Microsoft study revealed in this article by Warwick Ashford of Computer Weekly, is very timely, as they come during an ongoing debate about the legal risk exposure versus the security risk mitigation that arises when you provide educational materials about Information Security to your customers. Fortunately, for financial institutions, customer education is a required process (see the 2011 Supplement to the FFIEC’s 2005 Guidance on Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment.”
We believe this is fortunate because we believe that customer education is not only a good mitigating control from a legal, security, and reputational risk perspective, but we also believe it is good customer service. In fact, we can’t understand why anybody would NOT want to offer to help protect their customers.
“The reputation of a thousand years can be destroyed by one act . . . . “
– Confucious
We feel that customer education should go BEYOND the requirements of any one regulation and establish some basic habits as a means of defending America by educating her!
And the article backs this up, with these facts from a Microsoft Study:
- Four in 10 US citizens experience weekly and even daily attempts to access their personal information and other data while using PCs online.
- 18% of more than 1,000 US adults polled in August 2014 reporting daily or weekly fraud attempts via mobile phones
- 22% reported fraud attempts on their tablet computers.
If you do not let 40% of your customers know what they need to do to help you protect your information, in our opinion you could be exposed to:
- Customers more likely to suffer from fraud, putting you in the middle between them and the bad guys.
- Inaccurate accusations that you, not the customer, compromised information.
- Lawsuits because you did not share this information with your customers.
Thus, we believe you should focus in on a Customer Education Program. We have templates to help you with this, have set up a blog on the subject (cat.infotex.com if you want to remember it!), and Dan Hadaway writes about it in the Hoosier Banker Magazine, and will be talking about Customer Education at the November 2014 IBA IT Security Conference!
Click Here To Read the Full Article
The above is what we call an “Article Review.” It is part of our attempt to help our readers find excellent reading materials to back up important technology risk management concepts. We try not to include articles that are merely news or additional news about mainstream issues. Instead, we try to highlight articles that our “typical clients” should be sure to read, or that are about concepts “outside the mainstream media.” infotex does not intend to endorse views representated by the writers of the articles we review, nor do we try to keep our Clients aware of EVERYTHING. For example, if a particular story concept is being reported upon in many different media sources, infotex usually chooses to ignore the story concept altogether, unless we can find a “unique take” on the story concept.
Original article by Warwick Ashford of Computer Weekly.
If you have articles you would like us to review, forward them to [email protected]!
