By James Pooley, Esq.
You can be sure that most of your staff are active on social media. For many employees, particularly younger ones, using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (among others) are as natural as breathing. But suppose an employee shared a secret internal file, such as the name of anonymous donor and how much that person contributed? Messaged a Dropbox link with confidential information (even if only to a fellow employee) over an insecure connection? Crowdsourced a question about a sensitive issue she was handling for a member?
Do scenarios like these keep you up at night? They should. Social media and the sharing culture it has sparked are very real threats to your organization.
Here are six tips to help you keep your association’s or nonprofit's sensitive information off social media feeds.
Understand that you're asking staff to go against their digital instincts.
By their very nature, social media platforms encourage users to publicly disclose the minutiae of their lives (usually the more, the better). The so-called Facebook generation is conditioned to casually communicate, swapping files and using the Cloud to store and access photos, music, and more. They are experts at revealing a lot using only 140 characters.
Making sure that social media doesn't become a hole through which your association’s secrets leak is an especially challenging task because you're essentially asking staff to check their habits at the door. They'll need to learn to operate based on a different set of standards that often contradict how they deal with information in their private lives.
Put social media policies in writing.
Don't assume that a few informal warnings and cautionary tales will keep all your employees from tweeting and posting what they shouldn't. If your association already has general policies about the disclosure of information assets, make sure they become part of the official set of rules that govern employees' use of social media. These policies will reinforce the need to keep personal and work issues separated and not to post about what is going on inside the organization.
Consider having these policies reviewed by legal counsel, since broad confidentiality restrictions may violate labor laws that guarantee employees the right to discuss their working conditions.
Additionally, organizations need to decide if social media business contacts belong to them or to their staff. According to recent court decisions, if this isn't clearly specified in the association's policies, those contacts and the social media account itself can be claimed by the employee when he leaves.
Train, train, and then train some more.
In many organizations, after initial orientation, data protection policies are left on the shelf and more or less ignored. That's dangerous, because staff can easily forget about the rules or lose respect for the dangers of noncompliance. Meanwhile, they may be working on collaborative projects, examining acquisition possibilities, receiving development proposals, and more. All of these situations can lead to personal social media connections, where you will be relying on the knowledge and good judgment of your employees to control risks.
You can mitigate much of this risk by creating a quality training program that engages your employees as part of the security defense team. They'll make fewer mistakes themselves on social media (and elsewhere), and they'll also be on the lookout for the mistakes of others. Keep in mind that the best training is continuous, careful, upbeat, and professional, and does not rely on threats. Be sure to include everyone—not just key knowledge workers—in social media security training. That includes contractors, temporary employees, and interns.
Know which devices might represent a risk.
The growing popularity of BYOD (bring your own device) policies means that many of your employees may well be storing sensitive information on the same laptops, smartphones, and tablets they use to scroll through status updates in the evenings. That's cause for concern, because cyberthieves can gain access to these devices' contents and your organization's systems through relatively easy-to-hack social media accounts and apps.
In addition to establishing clear policies on social media use and providing continuing training, consider technical mitigation measures. Mobile device management (MDM) tools can remotely configure devices, monitor what's on them, and even erase their data if lost. MDM techniques can also include encryption for data stored on or communicated from the device.
Teach employees to spot social media scams.
In addition to using MDM tools, training employees on methods that information thieves often use can help them avoid falling prey to traps on social media. For instance, social media profiles give hackers a lot of information that they can use to compose realistic-looking, customized email phishing messages.
But beyond that, websites themselves can be used directly to fool people into joining a fake group, survey, or event, sometimes using a money coupon as a lure. Other traps involve fake 'like' buttons, browser extensions offered for download, or compelling offers designed to make the viewer want to share them with friends. All of these social network scams are grounded on the idea that we are all so used to rapidly connecting, sharing, and exposing that we'll do it more or less automatically with anything that looks attractive. Teaching employees to think twice before clicking can help secrets stay secret.
Be aware of your official social media presence.
While you may not be able to fully control what your employees post on their personal social media accounts, you can certainly keep a close eye on official association Twitter, Facebook, and other social media pages.
Have a safety net of trusted employees monitoring and maintaining your organization's presence on social media to stop potentially revealing posts from ever reaching the public eye. Also, regularly change passwords to lock out account thieves who may have successfully procured your association's login information.
Social networking has become a fixture of modern personal and professional life, so embrace its many benefits. Just be aware of the security concerns social media represent and proactively work to prevent breaches, whether they come from employee use or official organization activity.
James Pooley, Esq., recently completed a five-year term as Deputy Director General at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, where he was responsible for management of the international patent system (PCT). Before his service at WIPO, Mr. Pooley was a successful trial lawyer in Silicon Valley for over 35 years, representing clients in patent, trade secret, and technology litigation. He is the author of Secrets: Managing Information Assets in the Age of Cyberespionage.