What is Data Misuse? 4 Ways to Detect and Prevent Misuse of Information

Access to data comes with significant responsibility, and misuse of this access can negatively affect organizations. When employees misuse data for personal gain or other unauthorized purposes, it can jeopardize data security and lead to costly breaches. Indeed, 68% of data breaches involve a human element, according to the 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon.

This article uncovers the complexities of data misuse by examining real-life scenarios where improper data handling led to significant repercussions. We’ll explain the underlying reasons for data misuse and provide four effective best practices to detect and prevent it within your organization. Lastly, we’ll recommend a solution for building robust protection against data mishandling.

What is data misuse?

The definition of data misuse is pretty simple: using any information in a way it’s not supposed to be used. Terms of proper data use are usually spelled out in laws, industry standards, corporate policies, and user agreements.

Data misuse is often associated with employee data theft. Unlike data theft, however, information isn’t always passed to third parties in the case of data misuse.

In some cases, data misuse can lead to a data breach. For example, an employee can copy data to a flash drive for personal use but lose it, resulting in a data leak. Or an employee can send data to their personal laptop, which can be hacked.

What are the types of data misuse?

There is a strong correlation between data misuse types and the reasons behind them. The most common types of misuse of information include:

Data misuse for personal gain

This type of data misuse involves someone exploiting sensitive data for their own benefit, often at the expense of others. For example, an employee might access your organization’s trade secrets or information about customers to start their own business or sell the data to your competitors. Such data misuse can result in financial losses, reputational damage, and the loss of competitive advantage for your organization.

Data misuse due to carelessness

Negligence, carelessness, or lack of proper training can also lead to data misuse. This could involve sharing data with unauthorized individuals, accidentally exposing sensitive information, or downloading data to unprotected personal devices. Poor data protection practices, such as lack of encryption or improper cloud storage configuration, can also lead to data breaches.

Data commingling

Commingling occurs when an organization uses personal data collected for a specific purpose and then reuses that data for another purpose, which in most cases violates the data subject’s consent. An example of such misuse of personal information would be a company collecting data for academic research and then sharing this data with a partner for marketing purposes. Misuse of personal data can lead to regulatory fines and lawsuits.

Data misuse can often go undetected for extended periods, yet its consequences can be damaging to your organization. In the following section, we analyze four real-world examples of data misuse and the negative impacts they had on organizations and the people associated with them.

4 major real-world examples of data misuse

Case #1: Northern Ireland police personal information leak

In August 2023, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) suffered a major data breach when the sensitive personal information of its workforce was accidentally published online. The breach occurred due to an employee’s mistake in responding to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. The leaked information contained the surnames, initials, ranks, roles, and workplace locations of about 10,000 PSNI officers and civilian staff.

In the wake of the event, some personnel found themselves having to relocate as they found themselves fearing for the safety and lives of their families and themselves. The breach also caused reputational damage to the PSNI and could result in financial penalties — the Information Commissioner has indicated a potential fine of up to £750,000 ($971,000) for the organization.

Case #2: Data exfiltration by Pentagon insider

In April 2023, the FBI arrested 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, who was a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard at the time. In this case of data misuse, Teixeira leaked highly classified military documents online. The suspect held a top-secret security clearance and had been systematically stealing and sharing these sensitive files for over a year.

The top-secret information that Teixera leaked included data about the state of the war in Ukraine, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, and China’s interests in Nicaragua. The leak is considered one of the most significant breaches of US national security in recent years, potentially compromising relationships with allies and exposing sensitive military operations. Teixeira faces up to 25 years in prison for unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents.

Case #3: Reddit phishing attack

In February 2023, Reddit became aware of a data breach that involved one of their employees. According to Reddit, cyberattackers send a copy of an internal website page to trick the employee into providing them with credentials and a second-factor token. By receiving access to the employee’s account, “the attacker gained access to some internal docs, code, as well as some internal dashboards and business systems.” The data leak also affected the information of company contacts and employees as well as some advertiser information.

This incident is an example of poor cybersecurity training for employees, which made the phishing attack successful. Although Reddit’s security team quickly removed the perpetrator’s access, there’s no clear way to tell if the attackers managed to use the leaked data. This data breach could have impacted the company’s reputation and caused issues with data privacy regulations.

Case #4: Credit Suisse insider attack

In February 2022, Credit Suisse suffered an insider attack carried out by an employee whistleblower. The employee leaked sensitive data of the bank’s customers to a German newspaper.

As a result, information on more than 18,000 accounts (which contained more than $100 billion) was revealed to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, and afterward to a wide number of other global media and organizations. Journalists quickly spread the information, as it contained data on “dirty billings” belonging to some people under sanctions. Shares of Credit Suisse lost around 3% after the incident.

4 steps to detect and prevent data misuse in your company

Ensuring the security of your data at rest and in transit is essential, so here are four key measures you can implement to significantly reduce the risk of data misuse in your organization:

1. Manage data access

Data access is the entry point for potential misuse. Employees and subcontractors could get unauthorized access to confidential or sensitive data in various ways:

• An admin may accidentally provide access
• An employee can use their legal access
• A malicious insider can use a shared account or a coworker’s password

Data can be misused when proper access management is not in place. Here’s how you can manage data access in your organization:

• Deploy secondary authentication

It’s important to identify each user to know who is trying to log in to the system. This becomes complicated when employees use shared accounts, such as admin and root. Therefore, it’s important to use secondary authentication if you use shared accounts.

• Deploy two-factor authentication (2FA)

Credential theft remains one of the most popular ways to breach an account. Multi-factor authentication allows you to conclusively verify a user’s identity, as it requires the user to provide an additional authentication factor to successfully log in to the system.

• Assign access attributes or user roles to each user account

Once a user’s identity is verified, you want to granularly manage their access. To do that, assign user roles or access attributes to each user account. Access management is especially important for privileged users, as their elevated rights pose significant risks if compromised.

2. Monitor user actions

One of the best ways to detect and prevent data misuse is to provide visibility into what happens when data is accessed. A dedicated user monitoring solution allows you to easily see what happens to data: when it is used, how, and by whom.

This method of insider threat mitigation includes:

• Сollecting user activity logs

This is the most basic way to monitor user actions. Logging every user action taken in your network provides you with context for actions. But if your company employs hundreds of workers, it’s almost impossible to detect data misuse in time using activity logs only.

• Continuous user activity monitoring (UAM)

UAM can help you catch a malicious insider in the act. Being able to evaluate the context around a user’s actions will arm you with the knowledge to make the right security decisions in real time.

• Video recordings

Modern user activity monitoring solutions combine continuous observation with searchable video recordings of each session. This way you can find records of a suspicious event within seconds, figure out the context, and determine whether the action had malicious intent.

Alongside system intrusion, privilege misuse and miscellaneous errors represent 83% of breaches, according to the 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon. This just underlines the importance of paying special attention to privileged users’ actions as well as educating staff on the proper handling of sensitive data.

3. Stay informed

Managing user access and monitoring user activity provides you with lots of activity records and logs that are useful for investigating data misuse and its consequences. However, this may be not enough to prevent incidents in real time.

The amount of time it takes you to detect and interrupt data misuse is one of the main factors influencing the cost of a data breach. According to the Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023 by IBM security, organizations that are able to identify and contain a data breach in less than 200 days save $1.02 million compared to those that take more than 200 days.

Therefore, effective prevention of breaches resulting from data misuse saves a lot of time and resources. Here are a few considerations to help you promptly detect and prevent data breaches:

• Simultaneous monitoring of a large number of employees is challenging and might not be very effective when done manually. That’s why automated alerts are a must for modern user monitoring software.
• The efficiency of rule-based alerts largely depends on how well-thought-out the set of rules is. When configured correctly, rules spare a security officer from a ton of false positives. Too few alerts is also a warning sign, as it might indicate that your rules don’t cover all suspicious actions.

4. Educate your employees

When thinking about how to prevent data misuse, don’t underestimate the power of employee education.

There are two key steps to educate your personnel:

• Include information on data security in a general corporate policy. A well-thought-out information security policy is a reliable source of information about in-house procedures and standards regarding cybersecurity. It’s the best way to let newcomers know what they can and can’t do with corporate data.
• Set up educational courses on data security. You can ask security officers to share their experiences. A generic course on cybersecurity is always useful to remind employees to not share their credentials, inform staff about new phishing methods, etc. Make sure to remind employees why taking care of sensitive data is important and what consequences data misuse can lead to.

To strengthen data security, you should also create a dedicated insider threat policy. It can help prevent your employees from misusing data. According to the 2024 Insider Threat Report by Cybersecurity Insiders, 70% of organizations worldwide have or are currently building insider threat programs.

It’s noteworthy that maintaining an insider threat and risk management policy is mandatory under NIST SP 800-53, HIPAA, GDPR, and other cybersecurity requirements. You can implement such policies on your own or as part of a wider cybersecurity policy.

To learn more about this vital element of data misuse prevention, check out our 10-step guide to building an insider threat program.

Preventing data misuse with Syteca

Syteca is a full-cycle insider risk management platform that can help you significantly reduce the chance of data misuse in your organization. Here’s how:

Syteca’s diverse cybersecurity capabilities can also help you meet the requirements of different standards, laws, and regulations. To name a few: GDPR, NIS2, DORA, HIPAA, ISO 27001.

Conclusion

Preventing data misuse is crucial for maintaining the integrity and security of your sensitive information. Implementing best practices such as monitoring user activity, managing user access to data, enabling prompt detection and response to insider threats, and educating employees can significantly reduce the risk of data breaches and misuse of information.

Syteca offers comprehensive solutions to help you implement these best practices effectively. With advanced user activity monitoring, robust access control, real-time alerts, and functions that help you streamline employee training, Syteca provides a powerful defense against data misuse. By integrating Syteca into your security strategy, you can enhance your organization’s ability to detect and prevent the misuse of data, ultimately safeguarding your information and maintaining trust with your stakeholders.