“You may feel your IT department is doing its duty, but this may not extend to all of your partners within the industry. They can all be subject to cybercrime, too”
driver’s licence and financial information, and details of an employee’s location. The good thing is that the industry has a long tradition of duty-of-care for the business traveller. “This has helped people create very effective strategies for the industry as a whole,” says Si-Yeon Kim, chief risk and compliance officer at American Express GBT. “But we must understand that data has a price beyond just raw monetary value. An individual piece of information may have less than a pound’s value on the black market; but the personal value and loss of business trust are immeasurable.” It’s difficult to be an expert in both cybersecurity and travel buying, so it is worth partnering with professionals in their field, and selecting suppliers that demonstrate good data security practices. “It is imperative that you work with your IT department to ensure that reasonable efforts are being made to keep data safe,” says Antoine Boatwright, chief technol- ogy officer at Hillgate Travel.
EDUCATION AND FOCUS Cybersecurity is not just about check-box compliance: there’s a real business risk involved, so it needs proper focus and edu- cation. Getting travelling executives not to tick ‘store credit card for next purchase’ when buying overseas with the corporate plastic helps, and as a travel manager pre-paying as many expenses as possible reduces the number of card transactions overseas in unsecure environments. Using virtual credit cards can also reduce
risk, as well as avoiding using multiple single-use apps and instead going with apps that can do the work of many pro- grammes, such as those offered by travel management companies. Travellers should avoid connecting to public wifi networks where they can, but this can be unavoid- able when on the move. Virtual private networks (VPNs) are one solution. A VPN enables users to safely exchange data across a public network as if their device was di- rectly connected to a private network, such as their office intranet, using encryption. Larger organisations can provide in-house
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM “Certainly understand what key fire-
power your suppliers are using, such as their firewall,” advises Boatwright. “Vali- date their ICO [information commission office] membership. Realise that smaller suppliers have less IT resources.” The key is to ask what your supplier
does with your data. Many organisations are now using sophisticated data analyt- ics and in some cases expanding their artificial intelligence capacity. “Once you know how the data will be used, you can go into the specifics of how it is being protected,” says Orner.
VPNs but, for smaller companies, cloud VPNs now start for tens of pounds sterling per month. As a travel buyer it is also good to ask questions of all your suppliers. One manager at a media company
whose data was recently breached, said: “Attacks can occur at any time – no one likes to talk about it since it affects the company’s reputation. You may feel your IT department is doing its duty, but this may not extend to all of your partners within the industry. They can all be subject to cybercrime, too. It’s a minefield.” The questions to ask are: how secure
is your service, and how is it secured? If you can’t find that in the documentation then further probing is needed. Are all communications encrypted? Are your databases encrypted? What do I need to know about your security? You can make ISO 27001, which covers information security, a pre-requisite for suppliers. You should also know what jurisdiction the supplier is in, since a lot of data sits on overseas servers. The US is a big player in the travel industry and there have been privacy and surveil- lance concerns with European-based data sitting on North American servers. A new deal on data transfer, called the EU-US Privacy Shield, was adopted by the European Commission in July last year and this should have set this straight, but only time will tell.
PASSWORD PROTECTED The insecurity of basic usernames and passwords is one of the biggest issues. Efforts to replace them with something safer go back a decade – IBM developers discussed ditching them as early as 2008. And biometrics as a way of identifying someone has existed for even longer and is now back in fashion. Even mobile selfies are now emerging as a way to verify people and payments in the consumer world. “Authentication technology has evolved more in the last few years than it has in the last two decades,” says Purdy. “But less than 10 per cent of companies out there have any form of dynamic authentication.” This way of verifying people is a
lot smarter and secure. It goes beyond passwords and instead adapts to a user’s situation and risk profile. This new type of authentication, also called adaptive au- thentication, can recognise changes in our behaviour – it isn’t static and context is crucial. For instance, is that person using the same device in their usual location? What else have they accessed lately? Does everything look normal? “The trend will be to move away from rules-based detection and prevention to include more artificial intelligence and learning agents that evolve,” says Hillgate’s Boatwright. That time can’t come soon enough for many who have been attacked.
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