The basic principles of GDPR are that any organization that handles the personal data of European Union residents or citizens must comply with the GDPR, including companies not based in the EU. The supervisory authority is the European Union. Hundreds of complaints of data loss were reported in months to the protection commissioner. Enforcement agencies, including the protection commissioner, can investigate and fine organizations for leaking confidential information without the user’s explicit consent.

Third-party services used by your organization must also be compliant. The stringent requirements around GDPR also apply to your email provider. So, for example, if your company communicates with EU-based customers through email, your email service provider, regardless of its headquarters or servers, must comply with GDPR. Business practices globally have changed the security policies governing consent of data handling to align with GDPR requirements. Organizations have invested in a consent management platform to ensure compliance with GDPR. Cookie consent also has been added to organizations to manage privacy and security policy controls.

Encryption – General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Companies can reduce the likelihood of a data breach by using encryption of personal data. Organizations can reduce the risk of fines for violating privacy laws. Cyber attacks are almost inevitable for companies above a specific size. Risk management plays a vital role in IT security, and data encryption is one way to protect against cyberattacks.

One of the required changes is the need to encrypt emails that contain the personal information of clients, customers, employees, or anyone else. Since Article 25 of the GDPR requires data protection by design and default for all business (IT) processes for products and services, the law makes personal data more secure and data leaks more unlikely. Many lawyers argue that this new law requires all emails to be encrypted by default.

Encryption is mentioned as one technical and organizational measure to secure data in the list of Art. 32 (1) of the GDPR. GDPR does not mention explicit encryption methods to accommodate the fast-paced technological progress.

The regulation also recognizes these risks when processing personal information. It places the responsibility on both the controller and the processor to implement technical and organizational measures to secure personal data (Art. 32 (1) GDPR). The GDPR leaves it up to the member states to decide which specific technical and organizational measures they consider appropriate in each case. However, it provides the controller with criteria to consider when choosing methods to secure their data.

Here are recommendations for encryption under GDPR.

Encryption of personal data benefits controllers and order processors. For example, losing a state-of-the-art encrypted mobile storage medium that holds personal data is not considered a data breach, which must be reported to the data protection authorities.

Fines For Violation

According to Article 83 of the GDPR, Supervisory Authorities (SAs) or any independent public authorities responsible for protecting the rights of natural persons may issue fines to any organization that cannot prove its GDPR compliance. These fines for compliance violations need to be effective, proportionate, and dissuasive. Several criteria for enforcement fines help SAs determine whether an organization must pay severe infringements and how hefty this fine must be.

• Tech companies and telecommunications companies have incurred the highest GDPR fines.
• Regulators are looking at a broad range of industries, including banks, bars, hospitals, and municipalities.
• Fines will rise because regulators are becoming more confident in enforcing the rules.
• Many states have enacted privacy legislation, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Violators of GDPR may be fined up to €20 million, or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is greater.

Biggest fines:

1. Amazon — €746 million ($823.9 million)
Year Issued: 2021
The online retailer’s Luxembourg EU headquarters tracked user data without acquiring appropriate consent from users or providing the means to opt-out of this tracking — resulting in Amazon receiving the largest GDPR fine to date.

2. WhatsApp — €225 million ($247 million)
Year Issued: 2021
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined WhatsApp for unclear privacy policies and a lack of transparency in using user data.

3. Google Ireland — €90 million ($99 million)
Year Issued: 2021
France’s CNIL fined Google Ireland for failing to give users an easy way to refuse cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive.
All data breaches must be reported within 72 hours or face fines. Businesses should ensure that customers’ personal information isn’t compromised. Senior management handles GDPA policy, implementation, and cultural change. An investigation by European data protection authorities often follows after a data breach, and the finding will identify underlying causes. These breaches could result from inadequate privacy policies, poor encryption practices, a lack of data protection leaders, and a culture that does not value data protection.
Organizations globally are recommended to have a data collection compliance framework around managing consent conditions from the consumers. Having supporting documentation showing valid consent and policy around conditions of approval helps protect an organization in case of a data breach.

Role Of Data Loss Prevention In GDPR 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 lost sales and customers.
• 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 GDPR Compliance

Management of DLP tools over time requires continuous evaluation and tuning. Over time, these tools became unmanaged, and their effectiveness improved. Many organizations only turn on “the basic DLP” rules because of the lack of resources to manage the solution full-time. Hackers know this. 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.

Data Loss Prevention identified protected compliance content within the email message in parallel with email encryption. It instilled rules to prevent GDPR-protected data from leaving through the email channel by enacting email encryption to protect information attempting to leave the organization unprotected.

As the GDPR privacy compliance is implemented, enterprises need to review their controls to ensure proper governance. They should also check their policies and capabilities around encryption, data sensitivity, and granular visibility.

Enterprises should review:

• Encrypt any email with GDPR information.
• The organization must enable policies and standards monitoring for risky behavior, external threats, and intentional violation of GDPR.

Email Encryption Solution From Trustifi

Trustifi One-Click Compliance™ and Data Loss Prevention features make it easy to prove GDPR compliance by ensuring your data remains secure, even if end-user data forgets to encrypt an email manually.

The email administrator quickly selects which standards and Data Loss Prevention policies must comply with GDPR. 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 leakage of GDPR confidential information sent. 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.

Click here to the see the demonstration video:

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 file is 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 reaching their intended recipient.

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.

Trustifi has an extensive roster of clientele throughout North and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. 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.