Information Leakage and Other Threat: What is Internal Audit's Role?

Abstract

Effective information management and security remains one of the most important aspects of every business entity. It is interesting to notice that if you “Google” the words “Data Leakage” more than 6,7 mn results are presented, while public news publishes on a frequent basis cases of data loss or leakage which receive great public awareness. According to latest data from DataLoss Database (http://datalossdb.org/statistics), there is an increasing trend of data and information leakage incidents over time during the years, with the majority of them (57%) from outside the organization while another 36% from inside. This trend is enforced by recent cases of data leakage by a large Insurance Company in the US (Anthem) of a firm illegally bought and sold 150mn customer’s information in Shanghai as well as an unprecedented leak of documents that revealed the closely guarded investment information of more than 100,000 people around the world.