The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) affects companies based in California. If your organization has Californian customers, they need to follow this law. Here’s what CCPA is, who needs to follow it, how it affects email usage, and how you can upgrade your email security strategy to stay compliant.

What Is CCPA, And Why Is It Important?

CCPA protects a California resident’s privacy rights, and it gives people added control and transparency over a business’ collection and use of personal information.

Under CCPA regulatory compliance, people have the right to know how the business collects, uses, and shares their personal information and have such information deleted and opt out of the sale of the data. Companies must not retaliate against consumers who exercise their CCPA rights.

Even if an organization operates outside of California, complying with the robust CCPA standards can help companies; build trust with the protection of personal consumer data. Many other states have introduced a version of privacy legislation similar to the CCPA. Becoming CCPA-compliant can help you build a solid foundation to adapt to new regulations more easily.

CCPA Encryption Requirements

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, there’s no explicit mention of requiring encryption measures, although organizations are wise to do so. Even though there may not be a clear requirement for data encryption, there are fines associated with data breaches involving “non-encrypted or non-redacted personal information.”  These fines might be waived if encryption was enabled since the breached data is encrypted and unintelligible without the decryption key.

Organizations are less likely to face fines or pen if the data is encrypted. For the highest level of security, encryption should protect data both while it’s at rest and in transit, regardless of where it is stored. Organizations have a responsibility to layer data-centric encryption into their data collection solutions to facilitate the secure transfer of data when fulfilling subject data requests.

Email Security Litigation Facts Around CCPA

Under the California Civil Code Section 1798.81.5, an organization or business that meets specific requirements and processes any California residents’ data must implement and maintain reasonable security processes and practices appropriate for its information.

Under CCPA, litigation only applies to unencrypted sensitive data disclosed or lost. To protect your company against direct or class action litigation related to data loss, organizations should encrypt all the personal information collected and stored. The highest level of protection, including email encryption and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution, should be enabled to ensure that all email attachments containing personal information are sent securely to the correct recipients.

Businesses should know the risks of using unencrypted communications regarding California privacy laws. In addition, companies should make sure that they comply with other state and federal laws regarding the protection of personal information. Encryption and other protection controls are used to protect information sent over networks.

Data Loss Prevention Strategy Aligning To CCPA

Data Loss Prevention systems detect sensitive information, including personally identifiable information (PII). Companies can configure DLP systems to prevent users from accidentally or intentionally sharing PII information while assisting organizations with compliance requirements and protection regulation mandates. Organizations can also integrate DLP software with other tools, such as identity and access management (IAM), data governance, and encryption, to provide additional security. Preventing unauthorized access to data and enforcing policies are critical for organizations collecting consumer data. DLP also helps organizations detect data breaches and take action to mitigate the damage caused by these incidents.

As personal data and its use are becoming more and more legislated worldwide, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions have emerged as indispensable tools in data protection strategies. DLP protects data against employee negligence or malice.

The solution provides an adaptive control for compliance and demonstrates due diligence in data loss prevention capabilities to external auditors.

Selecting a vendor like Trustifi with the experience to simplify email encryption and data leakage prevention as an adaptive security control is paramount to the organization.

Role Of Data Loss Prevention In CCPA Compliance

DLP is an effective tool for managing sensitive data. Businesses involved with using or handling the PII of individuals must follow security guidelines to avoid penalties.

Data Loss Prevention solves three significant objectives that apply to most organizations:

• First, is the organization collecting and storing consumer users’ personally identifiable information? 
• Second, does the organization have the process and capability to remove the client’s data upon request? 
• Third, does the organization have a secure access policy to enable multi-factor authentication based on user actions?  

DLP solutions can classify intellectual property in unstructured and structured forms. They can set policies and controls to prevent unauthorized access to intellectual property. Data visibility helps organizations gain insight into how individuals interact with data. DLP can remediate a variety of security challenges, including insider threats.

• Data breaches cause damage to the brand, regulatory violations, and loss of trust with consumers.
• Data Loss Prevention solutions require involving stakeholders.
• Data Loss Prevention solutions must be implemented correctly and well maintained.
• Data Loss Prevention solutions are complex. Encryption is necessary because it protects data.

Email Encryption And DLP – One Solution For CCPA Compliance

The hacker community knows that most security adaptive controls rarely get fully deployed, except for organizations that spend big dollars outsourcing to an MSSP or MSP service.

The following events are some of the leading causes of data leaks in 2022.

1. Misconfigured Software Settings.
2. Social Engineering
3. Recycled Passwords
4. Poor Encryption
5. Software Vulnerabilities
6. Use of Default Passwords.

Gartner often references in their security reports the challenges of misconfigured security solutions impact expected outcomes of SecOps protection strategies.

As the CCPA privacy compliance is implemented, enterprises should review their controls to ensure proper governance and alignment.

 Enterprises should review:

• Encrypt any email with PII information. Enabling DLP policies as a system-wide adaptive control will ensure all messages that match a CCPA privacy rule with encrypting the outbound message.
• The organization needs to enable policies and standards monitoring for risky behavior, external threats, and intentional violation of CCPA.

Email Encryption Solution From Trustifi

Trustifi One-Click Compliance™ and Data Loss Prevention features make it easy to prove CCAP compliance and ensure your data remains secure, even if an organization collecting consumer data forgets to encrypt an email manually. The email administrator quickly selects which standards and data loss prevention policies need to comply with CCPA. Trustifi’s intelligent AI Engine will scan all outbound emails for sensitive content such as student records and automatically encrypt them.

With Trustifi’s One-Click Compliance™, the solution takes the complexity out of compliance.

For an additional layer of security between potential attackers and your sensitive data, you can request that recipients verify their identities via multi-factor authentication(MFA).

With Trustifi, organizations collecting consumer information can send secure encrypted emails without remembering to click the encrypt email button. Just as quickly, recipients open an encrypted email with a single click even if they don’t have Trustifi themselves.

The email administrator sets all the DLP and email encryption policies on the backend to prevent accidental data loss of CCPA confidential information being sent externally. Other solutions require users to log in to a portal to access encrypted emails, adding complexity to sending and receiving messages.

“One-Click” Encrypt And Decrypt With Trustifi

Trustifi makes sending and opening emails simpler than ever. No log-ins, portals, or passwords are needed.

Groundbreaking Technology Supporting Optical Character Recognition Technology

Trustifi’s OCR technology uses machine learning to scan email attachments such as images and PDF files. It recognizes elements such as a credit card scan or a screenshot of a financial statement and categorizes those attachments as sensitive. The attachment files are automatically encrypted, reducing the opportunity for employees/individuals to transmit unprotected confidential material.

Emails Get Automatically Scanned

The system automatically scans outgoing emails, applies the rules your administrator sets, and then finds the https://trustifi.com/outbound/email-encryption/with no input from the user. This ensures that sensitive data and attachments are not at risk before they reach their intended recipient and are protected from the prying eyes of hackers.

Culture

Trustifi’s email security services feature a comprehensive suite of email tools for advanced threat protection, easily configurable Data Loss Prevention, and enterprise email encryption. Trustifi’s easy-to-use software is unmatched in its user-friendliness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Trustifi’s time to value, ease of deployment, and lower cost of ownership for SecOps make the company culture secure and a financial match for any client seeking email security, data exfiltration, and message encryption.

Why Trustifi?

Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on software as a service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest to use and deploy email security products, providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor.

As a global cybersecurity provider of both inbound and outbound email protection, Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, and Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to world security regulations, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.