Screenshots and Keystrokes Recording Might Harm Your Business
Screenshots and Keystrokes Recording Might Harm Your Business
Screenshots and keystrokes monitoring has become a widely used functionality for almost every software on the market.
The question, however, is this: is it safe for your business or not?
The reality is that there is a potential danger lying behind screenshots and keystrokes recording.
The implementation of keystrokes and screenshot monitoring may not only be harmful to your business, but it also might not go with your monitoring goals.
Take a look at how these features could potentially harm your business with two real-life examples.
Web Banking Details Revealed
In early 2006, banking details of a top Canadian manager were unintentionally revealed. This happened when the company’s IT team tried connecting to every company computer remotely to solve an emergency virus problem. As a result of this emergency, screenshots of confidential banking information were inadvertently leaked in a matter of seconds. While this happened very quickly, the manager was obviously not pleased with the situation. Thankfully, no legal action was taken since it was an accident. Now imagine what happens if you take screenshots on a regular basis.
In the case of monitoring software, confidential data such as web banking details, health information or anything considered to be sensitive is at a much higher risk, because it can be stored and easily accessed at any time.
Confidential data such as web banking details, health information might get revealed.
$90,000 Stolen from Banking Account
A Florida businessman filed a suit against Bank of America after unknown hackers gained unauthorized access into his Bank of America account and stole $90,000. An investigation found that his computer was infected with malicious software which captures screenshots, records every keystroke and sends this information to malicious users over the Internet. The hackers got hold of his username and password, and the rest is history.
Now think about it for a second,
The problem here is the same as in the first example; imagine recording keystrokes, capturing screenshots and storing them in the database on a daily basis.
Some of the important factors to consider. How excellent is your data protection? How well are your employees trained to handle sensitive data? The chances of an employee stealing this information, resulting in security breaches that could lead to data leakage, are high. The consequences may include legal issues, loss of clients and damage to your reputation.
Security breaches may cause confidential data leakage. The consequences could be legal issues, loss of clients and damage to your reputation.
7 Ways Your Business can be Affected
- Confidential information leakage
- Invasion of privacy
- Data security problems
- Incompatible with HIPPA environment
- Criminal intent
- Micro-management
- Problems with antivirus
Screenshots and keystrokes recording can capture confidential information such as banking details, private passwords, personal email messages, sensitive screen content, and even deleted information. And no matter how good the masking algorithms are, you will never be able to hide all sensitive data obtained by the screenshots recording.
This type of monitoring has the potential to infringe privacy, break trust and morale in the workplace.
Software that records keystrokes or screenshots can jeopardize data security since it allows unauthorized people to obtain login data such as passwords, which can be used to access even more private data.
Monitoring software with functionalities such as screenshots capturing and keystrokes recording is not compliant with the HIPAA environment because it deals with protected health information.
Any keystroke or screenshots monitoring device or software can be extensively used with malicious or criminal intent, especially in an environment that is not safe.
The use of these features could lead to micro-managing employees. ( micromanagement can harm productivity)
Antivirus software does it’s best to recognize and block malicious software on a computer. Keystrokes and screenshots features might come in conflict with an antivirus, so the monitoring software will be prevented from operating.
Conclusion
As you can already tell, these features may be considered too invasive, and the aftermath of such monitoring is potential data breaches and legal risks.
If this is not what you want for your business, we would suggest implementing monitoring software void of “invasive” features unless your line of work requires screenshots and keystrokes for investigative purposes.
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