In March of this year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the Chamber) hosted a summit that was related specifically to the airline industry and the range of issues it must deal with. One of the more worrisome of these was cybersecurity.
The airline industry is a hot target for cybercriminals. They have a lot of information on a lot of people on any given day. They receive and sometimes store a plethora of information on passengers. We give them our payment card details, full legal names, passport numbers, visa information, dietary restrictions, origination and destination information, and many other bits of information; some of it very sensitive indeed.
While it may not be as much as the airlines, most businesses do store some amount of personal information about their customers and clients. Even a small amount is enough to put a high priority on cybersecurity.
The Chamber put together a list of guiding principles that could apply to any business in order to help keep cyber criminals at bay. They include:
- Keeping the bad guys out
- Setting up systems properly
- Protecting data if you must have it
- Encrypting data if you must send it out
- Protecting yourself against malware and other attacks
- Building your software properly and securely
- Keeping access to payment card data at a minimum
- Making sure people really are who they say they are
- Remembering to attend to physical security
- Tracking who goes where and what they do
- Testing and checking that everything is working correctly
- Making sure everyone knows the rules and guidelines
The Chamber also recommended using tokenization and Point-to-Point encryption for making payments considerably safer. Tokenization makes the data less valuable in the hands of the criminals and the point-to-point encryption protects any data while it is in transit.
The airline industry may have different challenges from many others, but the cybersecurity principles are universal, regardless of the type of company or size of it. Securing data should be a priority from the IT department to the boardroom level. A major data breach can have major affects on a business from losing customers to litigation to tanking stock prices. In a study of 4,500 adults across the globe, conducted by SafeNet, Inc., 65% say they would never or were very unlikely to do business with a company that had experienced a data breach where financial data was stolen. Taking a proactive approach to cybersecurity can help lower your organization’s risk of being highlighted in the next news cycle.
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